Overview Research at the Faculty of Law

The Faculty of Law at UNSW is one of Australia's leading law faculties, with some 65 professors and lecturers, many of whom are pre-eminent in their fields. The Faculty has two main components: the Law School and Atax. Also associated with the Faculty is a range of specialist centres.

The Faculty has a strong commitment to research and, in addition to the work of its Faculty members, has a strong cohort of faculty research students of the highest quality enrolled in the Research Programs which include PhD, SJD and LLM by Research. Our research is disseminated not only through the conventional academic publication of books and articles including Faculty Journals and Publications, but also through contributions to policy formulation via law reform commissions, governmental departments, and other agencies. In a number of fields, books by UNSW academics are recognised as both groundbreaking and definitive.


Areas of Specialisation

The Faculty has particular research strengths in: constitutional and administrative law; comparative law; corporate and commercial law; criminology, criminal procedure and criminal justice; European law; human rights law; Indigenous law; information technology law; intellectual property; international law; Japanese law; law and social theory; media and communications law; procedure and evidence; public law; taxation law and practice; international tax; tax compliance costs; GST; taxation of corporations and tax policy.

Interdisciplinary collaboration is a significant feature of the Faculty's work: several current research projects involve colleagues from other faculties, and the Faculty includes staff with doctorates in psychology, sociology, anthropology, history, taxation and economics, as well as in law.

Similarly, Faculty staff engage in significant collaborative work with academics at other universities around Australia and further afield.

Nor should the Faculty's areas of specialisation be considered simply in terms of topic areas. More fundamentally, its special research focus is inspired by its broader commitments. One foundation stone of the Faculty's work, for example, is its commitment to social justice - specifically the examination of the limits and possibilities of the law in attempts to achieve social justice. This commitment leads inevitably to a second commitment: law is not to be studied in artificial abstraction, but rather in its social, economic, and political contexts as a distinctive and flexible source of discipline, regulation, and facilitation.