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Research Areas for Potential Higher Degree by Research Students

If you are a potential higher degree by research (HDR) applicant and looking for research areas for your thesis proposal, the information under each of the following research clusters may be of help to you.  Please also have a look at an example of how a good thesis proposal should be developed.

Criminal Law and Justice

This cluster includes:

  • Alternative Dispute Resolution
  • Criminal Justice
  • Criminal Liability
  • Cybercrime
  • Juries - Criminology
  • Mental Health and Medical Law
  • Non-adversarial Justice
  • Prisons and Prison Management
  • Problem-solving Courts
  • Sexual Trafficking
  • Sentencing
  • The Confiscation of the Proceeds of Crime

Potential supervisors:

Innovation and Information Law

The cluster includes the following areas:

  • Access to information and protection of information (privacy, media, freedome of information
  • Balance of public and private domains
  • Broadcasting law, contempt of court
  • Copyright and designs
  • Creation of information and innovation
  • Defamation
  • Electronic health records
  • Exploitation of information and dissemination of information
  • Information technology law
  • Intellectual property
  • Internet law and internet governance issues
  • Media
  • Mediums of information (radio communication, telecommunication, internet, traditional forms)
  • Ownership of information (property rights)
  • Patents, trademarks, confidential information
  • Plant breeders' rights
  • Regulation of new technologies
  • Research materials on the internet
  • University intellectual property rights (ownership and access) 

Potential supervisors:

International, European and Comparative Law (Incorporating Human Rights)

This cluster includes the following research areas:

  • International Law
  • Resources and Environmental Law
  • European Union Law
  • Comparative Law
  • Dispute Resolution
  • Access to Justice
  • Corporations and Human Rights
  • Refugee Law
  • Indigenous Law
  • Trafficking
  • International Aid and Development

Potential supervisors:

 Legal Philosophy and Legal Theory

The primary areas of this research cluster are:

  • Interdisciplinary, e.g. indigenous rights, history of ideas
  • Political entitlements (Political philosophy)
  • Moral philosophy (Philosophy of language)
  • Analytical legal philosophy
  • Theory of criminal law
  • Access to justice

Potential supervisors:

Commercial and Private Law

The broad research areas covered in this cluster are Bankruptcy and Restitution Law, Business Law, Commercial Law, Company Law, Competition Law, Consumer Law, Contract Law, Corporate Governance, E-Commerce in International Transactions, Equity Law, Insolvency Law, International Finance, Partnership Law, Property Law, Tort Law, Trust Law, Superannuation Law, Venture Capital Law.

Potential supervisors:

Public Law, Government and Regulation

The cluster can be defined as covering the areas of

  • Legal regulation (including statutory regulation and judicial review) and non0legal (alternative) forms of regulation, including self-regulation (such as the AFL Tribunal, the Press Council, Codes of Practice)
  • Administrative law mechanisms
  • Private ombudsmen
  • Contract and statutory regimes (particularly in regard to Labour and Employment Law)
  • Gaps and silences in regulation
  • Informal structures
  • Command and control (privatization)
  • International governance
  • Constitutional law and theory
  • Labour law 

Potential supervisors:

The Legal Profession

Current interests include:

  • Clinical techniques (inculcating passion in future lawyers)
  • History of vexatious litigants
  • Automatism
  • Ethics of large law firms
  • Corporate accountability and decision making
  • Clinical teaching
  • Normative responsibility in criminal justice
  • Private justice schemes
  • Finding positive and achievable ways to encourage ethical behavious
  • Legal education

Potential supervisors:

Family Law

This cluster covers research connected to 'families' in the broadest sense.  Members of the cluster have research interest that include:

  • Parenting orders, variation of orders and best interest of the child
  • Formal and informal residence arrangements for children of separated families in Australia, in the light of the Family Law Amendment (shared parental responsibility) Act 2006
  • The effect of new 'equal time' provisions in the Family Law Act
  • Children in immigration detention
  • Lesbian parenting
  • Property and children aspect of domestic relationships
  • Child support and maintenance
  • Spousal maintenance
  • Indigenous family law and the way that the mainstream legal systems of colonial countries have accommodated indigenous family structures and law
  • "Customary adoption" in New Zealand, Australia and Canada
  • Processes of family law dispute resolution
  • The role and practices of the legal profession in family law disputes
  • Legal ethics in family legal practice
  • The role of Family Relationship Centres
  • The 'shadow' of family law
  • The relevance of domestic violence in family law related decision making and Family Court proceedings, including how family violence will be treated under new Act
  • Different family violence legislation at Federal and State levels
  • The relevance of child abuse in family law proceedings, including how child abuse will be treated under new Act
  • The relevance of gender in family law decision making (especially for women)
  • Sex workers and family law

Potential supervisors: