Professor Pamela Hanrahan is one of Australia's leading authorities on financial services law and regulation. In addition to her academic career at the UNSW Business School and, previously, the Melbourne Law School and as a Visitor at the Centre for Corporate and Commercial Law at the University of Cambridge, she has over 15 years experience as a lawyer in private practice and four years as a senior regulator in Australian Commonwealth and State government agencies.

Her primary expertise is in the complex interaction between principles of common law and equity and the statutory obligations imposed on individuals and corporations in areas regulated by the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) and the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority, including financial services, funds management, superannuation, corporate governance, and securities and financial product disclosure. In particular, she is an expert on the duties and liabilities of firms and individuals in the ‘investment chain’. This includes fiduciary intermediaries such as responsible entities of registered managed investment schemes, operators of wholesale collective investment vehicles and schemes, superannuation trustees, custodians, asset consultants, fund managers, broker/dealers, financial advisers and investment banks.

From 2008-2010, Pamela was head of the Investment Managers stakeholder team at ASIC and a member of the International Organization of Securities Commissions’ Technical Committee 5 on collective investments. Her responsibilities included dealing with the aftermath of high profile and complex investment scheme collapses including frozen mortgage funds and failed agribusiness and infrastructure schemes, and the Trio Capital fraud. In 2010-2011 she was Special Counsel at ASIC and the ASIC Regional Commissioner for Queensland. From 2013-2015, she was Registrar of Community Housing for New South Wales.

Pamela has published widely in the areas of financial services regulation, funds management and superannuation law, and corporations and securities law. She has taught corporations law at the undergraduate and graduate level, and managed investments law and financial services law at the Masters level, at the Melbourne Law School for over a decade, and is a former director of studies in banking and financial services law for the Melbourne Law Masters. In the financial services area, her books include Managed Investments Law & Practice (CCH, looseleaf, 1999 - 2017), which is the leading Australian text on the law of managed investment schemes, and Funds Management in Australia: Officers' Duties and Liabilities (LexisNexis, 2007), which provides a detailed treatment of directors’ and other officers’ legal responsibilities across a range of Australian collective investment vehicles. In corporations and securities law, she is co-author with Professor Bob Baxt AO and Justice Ashley Black of the main securities law treatise in Australia, Securities and Financial Services Law (LexisNexis, 2017), and co-author with Professor John Farrar of Corporate Governance (LexisNexis, 2017). She is lead author of the Australian, Singaporean, Malaysian and New Zealand editions of the corporations law textbook Commercial Applications of Company Law (OUP, first published CCH 2000, 18th edition 2017). In 2014 she was the Australian Reporter to the International Academy of Comparative Law’s world congress on the law of close corporations.

Pamela holds Honours degrees in Arts and Law from the University of Melbourne, a Masters degree (with Honors) from Case Western Reserve University in the United States, and a Doctorate of Juridical Science from the University of Melbourne. She is admitted in the High Court of Australia and the Supreme Court of Victoria. She is a Fellow of the Financial Services Institute of Australasia and a member of the Corporations Committee of the Law Council of Australia. Pamela is a Professor in the School of Taxation and Business Law at the UNSW Business School, a Senior Fellow of the Melbourne Law School, a Member of the Centre for Law, Markets and Regulation in the UNSW Law Schooll and an Associate of the Centre for Corporate Law and Securities Regulation at the University of Melbourne.