Staff Directory Dimity Kingsford Smith
Professor BA (Sydney) LLB (Sydney) LLM (LSE, London)
Contact Details Telephone:  +61 2 9385 2245 Email:  d.kingsfordsmith@unsw.edu.au Office:  Law Building 314

Professor Kingsford Smith teaches in the areas of corporations law and regulation of securities and financial products in the undergraduate degree. She teaches master of laws courses on corporate governance and on the regulation of online investing. She supervises a number of postgraduate research students on a wide range of corporate and financial regulatory questions. At the moment these range from a thesis investigating compliance with ASX disclosure rules and selective disclosure, through the effectiveness of independent directors to whether trust law is still an effective contributor to regulation of occupational superannuation schemes. She is also very interested in corporations and securities regulation in developing economies, and has supervised a PhD in this area. She also supervises Master of Laws and Honours theses.

Professor Kingsford Smith’s own research and publication is in the areas of corporate and financial regulation and regulatory theory and policy. She is currently the first chief investigator in an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant 2005-08 examining the regulation of online investing. Entitled ‘One Day, We’ll All Invest This Way! Regulating Online Investment’ the project includes leading Australian, US, Canadian and UK researchers. With the growth of retail investment more generally, Professor Kingsford Smith has extended her research to legal and empirical consideration of the effectiveness of disclosure as a regulatory technique in consumer investment. She has published work which considers to what degree disclosure may need supplementation by other regulatory approaches. In 2009 she published research on the effect of the global financial crisis on retail investors.

Professor Dimity Kingsford Smith joined the University of New South Wales Law Faculty in January 2005. She was professor of law and Director of the Centre for Law in the Digital Economy at Monash University between 2000-2004. She previously held appointments at the University of Sydney and in the UK at University College London and Warwick University. In 1999 she was a visitor at the London School of Economics law department.

Professor Kingsford Smith is the Chair of the Conduct Review Commission, a professional disciplinary panel in the financial services industry. She has advised the Australian Securities and Investments Commission, and consulted to the Canadian Investment Dealers Association. Professor Kingsford Smith has served on the Executive Committee of the Australian Corporate Law Teachers Association, and is a member of the Australian Society of Legal Philosophy and the Julius Stone Institute. She holds membership of the US and Canadian Law & Society Associations. In 2006 she was the author of a research report entitled ‘Importing the E-World’ for the Task Force to Modernize Securities Legislation in Canada. Prior to contributing to the work of this Task Force, Dimity Kingsford Smith authored policy submissions to the Australian Wallis Committee on the regulation of financial markets, and was a member of the legal committees of the Australian Institute of Company Directors and Law Society of New South Wales.

Recent publications include: Financial Services Regulation and the Investor as Consumer’ in Howells, Ramsay and Wilhelmsson (ed) The Handbook on Research on International Consumer Law (Edward Elgar, 2010) 431-481; ‘Regulating Risk: Individuals and the Global Financial Crisis’ in University of New South Wales Law Journal Vol 32(2), 514-546 (2009). ‘The Same Yet Different: Australian and US Online Investing Regulation’ University of Toledo Law Review, (2006) 37(2) 461-95; ‘Beyond the Rule of Law? Decentred Regulation in Online Investment’ (2004) 26:3 Law & Policy 439-476; ‘Is Due Diligence Dead? Financial Services Disclosure Under the Financial Services Reform Act 2001’ (2004) 22 Company & Securities Law Journal 128-150; “What is Regulation? A Reply to Julia Black’s ‘Critical Reflections on Regulation’” (2002) 27 Australian Journal of Legal Philosophy 37-46;