Kit Barker

Private law plays a foundational role in regulating relationships between individuals, but its great complexity and responsiveness to social change present constant challenges for legal coherence, fairness, accessibility and enforcement.

Professor Kit Barker’s research addresses contemporary issues in private law and theory, with particular focus on the law of torts, unjust enrichment law, and private law remedies. It has identified problems in courts’ approach to cases involving negligently inflicted economic loss, misstatements, and government wrongdoing, as well as in their understanding of liabilities for unjust enrichment. Most recently, it tackles pressing questions about law enforcement across both public and private law, modelling the way in enforcement powers are currently distributed between state agencies and private actors. This research reveals the persistent role that private enforcers play in plugging gaps in public law enforcement systems across a wide range of regulatory fields such as criminal prosecution, environmental regulation, judicial review of government action, abortion laws, misfeasance in public office, and human rights law.

Barker’s work adopts a mixed doctrinal and theoretical approach, drawing strongly on Anglo-Australian and Commonwealth legal traditions. It often uses Hohfeldian analysis to clarify the meaning of key legal concepts and aspires to make the law’s rules more accessible and more coherent with their underlying aims. It regularly engages with contemporary law reform debates. He has collaborated with scholars from the UK, Australia, Canada, Singapore, the USA and the EU, editing (and contributing to) international volumes with leading publishers such as Hart, Edward Elgar, and CUP.

Professor Barker has published over 120 scholarly works. He is the author of five books: Enforcement Rights in Public and Private Law (OUP, 2026), Unjust Enrichment (LexisNexis, 2024), The Law of Torts in Australia (OUP, 2012), and Remedies: Commentary and Materials (Thomson, 2015). He has co-edited a further six international essay collections. His work has informed and shaped modern debates about symbolic damages and rights-recognition, proportionate liability, tort liability, government accountability, the role and rationale of restitutionary remedies and the interface between private and public law and policy. His scholarship is cited internationally in leading journals, legal texts and case law across common law jurisdictions, and has contributed to law reform discussions in Australia and the UK.

Professor Kit Barker is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Law, the current Director of the Australian Centre for Private Law and a founder of the Current Legal Issues Seminar Series, fostering professional collaboration and public engagement in the solution of contemporary legal problems and advocating for continual improvements in the administration of justice.