Staff
Academic Members
- Professor Tim Lindsey
- Associate Professor Pip Nicholson
- Dr Sarah Biddulph
- Associate Professor Sean Cooney
- Mr Andrew Godwin
- Ms Stacey Steele
- Dr Amanda Whiting
Manager
Senior Administrator
Administrator
Academic Members
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Director
Professor Tim Lindsey joined the Centre in 1990 and was appointed to the Law School in 1994. His appointments include: Professor of Asian Law (until July 2006), ARC Federation Fellow (from August 2006), Director of the Asian Law Centre (since 2000), Associate Dean (International) in the Faculty of Law (until July 2006) and Co-Director of the Centre for Islamic Law and Society (from 2005)..
A graduate of the University of Melbourne Law School, Tim completed his doctoral thesis in Indonesian studies. His research interests are in the areas of Islamic law, Indonesian law, constitutional law, comparative law, law reform in developing countries and 'rule of law'. His Federation Fellowship 'Islam and Modernity: Syari'ah, Terrorism and Governance in South-East Asia' brings all these themes together. Tim researches and teaches in bahasa Indonesia and is a long-serving member of the Board of the Australia-Indonesia Institute and a member of the Foreign Affairs Council, both in the Department of Foreign Affairs. He is an Associate Member of the Academie Internationale de Droit Comparé and of the International Council of the Asia Society He worked previously at Mallesons Stephen Jaques and has been a practising member of the Victorian Bar since 1990, now specialising in Indonesian and East Timorese law. He has near-native fluency in bahasa Indonesia.
Tim's publications include Indonesia: Law & Society (now in its second edition); Indonesia: Bankruptcy, Law Reform and the Commercial Court; Corruption in Asia: Rethinking the Governance Paradigm (with Howard Dick); Indonesia After Soeharto: Prospects for Reform; Law and Labour Market Regulation in East Asia (with Sean Cooney, Richard Mitchell and Ying Zhu); Chinese Indonesians: Remembering, Distorting, Forgetting (with Helen Pausacker), also in its second edition; and Law Reform in Developing and Transitional States. Tim is a Founder and co-Editor of the Australian Journal of Asian Law and is currently writing a monograph on Islamic laws in Indonesia.
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Director (Comparative Legal Studies Program) Associate Professor Pip Nicholson joined the Asian Law Centre in 1997 as Associate Director (Vietnam) and was a Senior Fellow of the Faculty from 1998. She joined the Faculty permanently as a lecturer in 2002, becoming a senior lecturer in 2004 and Associate Professor in 2007. She was appointed Director of the Comparative Legal Studies Program of the Asian Law Centre in 2006. A graduate in Law and Arts from the University of Melbourne with a Masters in Public Policy from the Australian National University, Pip teaches on the Vietnamese legal system in both the undergraduate and graduate programs of the Melbourne Law School and teaches on Vietnamese law to a consortium of American law schools. Pip also teaches Law and Economic Reform in Asia, Fundamentals of the Common Law and Principles of Public Law. Pip's doctoral research focused on the Vietnamese court system between 1945 and 1976, in the course of an analysis of the extent to which the Vietnamese legal system mirrored or diverged from its Soviet parent. Pip is interested in the challenges of cross-cultural legal research and legal reform - particularly within Asia. She has recently completed research on drug trials in Vietnam and continues her analysis of Vietnamese court reform. Current projects include a study of the relationship of comparative law theory to legal reform in Vietnam, analysis of the Vietnamese economic court and studies of district courts in Vietnam. Pip consults on changes in transitional legal systems, particularly Vietnam.
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Associate Director (China) Dr Sarah Biddulph joined the Centre in 1989 and was appointed to a lectureship in the Law School in 1992. She is a graduate of Sydney University in Law and Chinese Studies and studied in Shanghai as one of the Attorney-General’s representatives under an exchange agreement with the PRC Ministry of Justice. She worked as a lawyer in Shanghai with the Australian law firm Blake Dawson Waldron between 1998 and 2001 and has near-native fluency in Mandarin. Sarah is the co-founder of the China Law Network and teaches and researches in the area of Chinese law. Her work has focussed on contemporary Chinese administrative law, labour and comparative law. Sarah currently holds an ARC grant with Sean Cooney and Zhu Ying to examine regulatory responses to the problems of failure to pay wages. She is also currently part of a research team coordinated by the University of British Columbia, researching Cross Cultural Dispute Resolution. Sarah completed her PhD in 2004, entitled 'The Legal Field of Policing in China: Administrative Detention and Law Reform'. Her thesis looked at the development and legal reform of three administrative detention powers exercised by the Chinese public security organs; detention for education of prostitutes and clients of prostitutes, coercive drug rehabilitation and re-education through labour. A book based on this work, Legal Reform and Administrative Detention Powers in China, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2007.
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Associate Director Associate Professor Sean Cooney joined the Centre in 1992 after four years in legal practice and completed his LL.M. in Asian law in that year. He completed his doctoral studies at Columbia University in 2005 and has been a visitor at Australian National University, National Taiwan University and National Chengchi University in Taiwan. Sean's research interests include East Asian employment and labour law, democratic transitions and sovereignty issues (with a particular emphasis on Taiwan), comparative law, and contract and regulatory theory. He researches and teaches in Chinese and is fluent in French and German. His publications include Law and Labour Market Regulation in East Asia (with Tim Lindsey, Richard Mitchell and Ying Zhu), as well as articles in a range of international journals in English and Chinese.
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Associate Director (Asian Commercial Law) Mr Andrew Godwin joined the Centre as an Associate Director in late 2006, after being appointed as an Associate of the Centre in early 2006. He was appointed Senior Lecturer in the Law School in early 2008. He has 15 years experience in private practice, 10 of which were spent in Shanghai where he was a partner at Linklaters and Chief Representative of their Shanghai offices. Since returning to Melbourne in 2006, Andrew's focus has shifted to legal education and professional training and development for lawyers. Andrew’s academic interests include Asian law, property law, insolvency law and legal education. A former research assistant at the Asian Law Centre, Andrew has a BA (Hons), LLM (Hons) and LLM from the University of Melbourne.
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Associate Director (Japan) Ms Stacey Steele joined the Centre in 1997 as a research associate and was appointed Associate Director (
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Associate Director (Malaysia) Dr Amanda Whiting joined the Faculty of Law at The University of Melbourne as a Lecturer in 2004. She been a member of the Asian Law Centre since 1999. She has taught in the LLB courses Land, Race and Law in Southeast Asia, Law and Society in Southeast Asia, Law and Civil Society in Asia, History and Philosophy of Law, Property and Principles of Public Law; and in the Graduate subjects Islamic Law and Politics in Asia. and Citizens, Groups and States in Asia. Her research is in the area of human rights institutions and practices in the Asia-Pacific Region, gender and religion, and Malaysian legal history. She is Associate Director (Malaysia) of the Asian Law Centre. Amanda completed her honours degree in Arts at the University of Melbourne in 1981 and then taught seventeenth and eighteenth century history at the University's History Department over the next decade. She also has a Diploma of Education (1988) and a Graduate Diploma of Indonesian (1995) which was partly undertaken at Universitas Kristen Satya Wacana, Indonesia. She completed her LL.B. with First Class Honours in 2001. In 2007 she completed her doctorate - a feminist analysis of mid-seventeenth century English legal and political history. In 2004 her article "'Some Women can Shift it Well Enough': A Legal Context for Understanding the Women Petitioners of the Seventeenth-Century English Revolution" appeared in 21 Australian Feminist Law Journal 77. Amanda is the author of 'Situating Suhakam: Human Rights Debates and Malaysia's National Human Rights Commission' (2003) 39 (1) Stanford Journal of International Law 59, and 'In the Shadow of Developmentalism: The Human Rigths Commission of Malaysia at the Intersection of State and Civil Society Priorities in C Raj Kumar and DK Srivastava (ed) Human Rights and Development: Law, Policy and Governance (Hong Kong: LexisNexis Butterworths, 2006), both of which provide a contextualised reading of the meanings that human rights have in Malaysia and for Malaysians. With Andrew Kenyon and Tim Lindsey (of this Faculty) and Tim Marjoribanks (Faculty of Arts) she is engaged in an ARC-funded Discovery Project, 'The Media and ASEAN Transitions: Defamation Law, Journalism and Public Debate in Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore'. With Dr Carolyn Evans of this Faculty she is the editor of Mixed Blessings: Laws, Religions and Women's Rights in the Asia Pacific Region (Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff, 2006), a book about women's experiences of the dual regimes of law and religion in the Asia-Pacific region. Amanda is currently writing about the colliding and conflicting understandings of secular and religious law in Malaysia (particularly as they affect women and children); and she is preparing to write a history of the legal profession in Malaysia, focussing on its role as an agent of civil society. Amanda has been involved with the Australian Journal of Asian Law since its inaugural issue in 1999 and has been an editor since 2002. With Associate Professor Tim Lindsey, Director of the Asian Law Centre, she edited and contributed to Doing Business in Indonesia (Singapore, CCH: 2000).
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Manager
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Ms Kathryn Taylor joined the Centre in 1998 as the Administrator. In 2005, she was appointed Manager of the Asian Law Centre and Manager of the Centre for Islamic Law and Society (formerly, Centre for the Study of Contemporary Islam). Kathryn is also the Project Manager of Professor Tim Lindsey's ARC Federation Fellowship and Project Manager of Asian Law Online, the largest bibliographic database of English-language materials on Asian legal systems in the world. She has been an editorial assistant to the Australian Journal of Asian Law since 2000. Kathryn completed her Arts degree with Honours in Chinese from the University of Melbourne in 1999, after spending 16 months studying Mandarin at National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan R.O.C. She completed a Master of Management (International Business) at Monash University in 2001. As part of this degree, Kathryn also completed a Winter Semester in Chinese Law at the East China University of Politics and Law. Kathryn's research interests include the Chinese language and culture, Asian legal systems (particularly the legal systems of China and Taiwan), international business, the current state of China-Taiwan relations and Islam in China. She has near-native fluency in Mandarin and is currently editing a book with Stacey Steele, entitled Legal Education in Asia: Globalisation, Change and Contexts.
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Senior Administrator
Administrator
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Administrator Ms Kelly McDermott joined the Centre in 2007. She is the Administrator for the Asian Law Centre, the Centre for Islamic Law and Society and Professor Tim Lindsey's ARC Federation Fellowship.
Kelly completed her Arts degree in Religious Studies at the University of Otago, New Zealand in 1999. After completing the Graduate Diploma of Teaching (Secondary) in 2002 she moved to the United Kingdom where she taught Religious Studies at a state school in the North East of England. After extensive travelling around the United Kingdom and Europe, Kelly has returned to Australia to work at the University. She is hoping to continue postgraduate studies in Islamic Law and develop skills and knowledge as a research assistant. Kelly is currently working on producing Islamic materials for school teachers, under Professor Tim Lindsey's Collier Charitable Fund Grant "Revealing Islam to a New Generation"
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