Areas of interest are legal and moral philosophy, constitutional law and bills of rights.
Professor James Allan holds the oldest named chair at The University of Queensland. Before arriving in Australia in February of 2005 he spent 11 years teaching law in New Zealand at the University of Otago and before that lectured law in Hong Kong. Professor Allan is a native born Canadian who practised law in a large Toronto law firm and at the Bar in London before shifting to teaching law. He has had sabbaticals at the Cornell Law School, at the Dalhousie Law School in Canada as the Bertha Wilson Visiting Professor in Human Rights, and at the University of San Diego School of Law.
Professor Allan has published widely in the areas of legal philosophy and constitutional law, including in all the top English language legal philosophy journals in the US, the UK, Canada and Australia, much the same being true of constitutional law journals as well. Professor Allan also has a sideline interest in bills of rights; he is opposed to them. Indeed he is delighted to have moved to a country without a national bill of rights. He has been actively involved in the efforts trying to stop one from being enacted here in Australia. Professor Allan’s latest book is The age of foolishness: a doubter's guide to constitutionalism in a modern democracy (published 2022). Professor Allan also writes widely for newspapers and weeklies, including The Australian, The Spectator Australia and Quadrant, and since arriving here in Australia he has given or participated in more than 80 lectures, debates and talks.
Associate Professor Rebecca Ananian-Welsh is a constitutional law scholar and Editor of the University of Queensland Law Journal at the TC Beirne School of Law. Her research focuses on courts, national security and press freedom and she has published widely in these fields, including more than 25 journal articles, two edited collections and a monograph. Her present research focuses on the nature of courts under the Constitution, and the protection of press freedom.
Rebecca's research in national security, press freedom and fair trial principles has been recognised in an Academy of Social Sciences in Australia’s Paul Bourke Award for Early Career Research and a UQ BEL Faculty award. Her book 'The Tim Carmody Affair: Australia's Greatest Judicial Crisis' (co-authored with Profs Gabrielle Appleby and Andrew Lynch), was shortlisted for a Queensland Literary Award and her Sydney Law Review article 'The Inherent Jurisdiction of Courts and the Fair Trial' has been shortlisted for the 2020 Article of the Year in the Australian Legal Research Awards.
Prior to joining UQ, Rebecca held positions at UNSW Law with the Laureate Fellowship Project 'Anti-Terror Laws and the Democratic Challenge' and the Gilbert + Tobin Centre of Public Law's Terrorism & Law Project, as a litigation solicitor at DLA Piper, and as a legal officer with the Federal Attorney-General's Department.
Associate Professor Francesca Bartlett lectures in Ethics and the Legal Profession and Contract Law. She is the Director of Teaching and Learning at the School of Law. She is a Fellow of the Centre for Public, Comparative and International Law and researches in the area of lawyers' ethics and practice, access to justice and women and the law. She was a CI on the Australian Feminist Judgments Project funded by the Australian Research Council under a Discovery Project Grant. She is undertaking a number of projects relating to lawyers working across Australia including around family violence, and how technology impacts upon access to justice and ethics in the legal profession. She has led a project concerning technology and access to justice in the legal assistance sector funded under an AIBE Applied Research Fund grant and was a CI on a project funded by the Queensland Law Society concerning disruption to and innovation by small law firms across Queensland. Francesca was a Visiting Fellow at the Centre on the Legal Profession at Stanford University in November 2018.
She is a member of the Queensland Law Society Ethics Committee and is the Vice President of the International Association of Legal Ethics. Francesca is an Academic Member of the School's Pro Bono Centre Advisory Board. Before joining the Law School, she practiced for a number of years as a commercial solicitor at a national law firm in Melbourne and Brisbane. Prior to embarking on her legal career, Francesca completed a PhD in English which concerned the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families.
Tamara Walsh is a Professor of Law and Director of the UQ Pro Bono Centre. She has degrees in both Law and Social Work, and her interest is in social welfare law and human rights. Her research examines the impact of the law on vulnerable people including children and young people, people experiencing homelessness, people on low incomes, people with disabilities, mothers and carers. Her research has spanned 20 years and has been widely published, both in Australia and internationally.
In 2008, Tamara designed and established the UQ Pro Bono Centre, along with Dr Paul O'Shea and Prof Ross Grantham. The UQ Pro Bono Centre facilitates student and staff participation in pro bono legal activities, particularly public interest research and law reform. It is now a flagship program of the UQ Law School.
In 2016, Tamara established the UQ Deaths in Custody Project, which she runs in partnership with Prisoners' Legal Service. This Project monitors deaths in custody across Australia, and administers a public website which is an important resource for researchers, coroners and members of the public: www.deaths-in-custody.project.uq.edu.au
In 2020, Tamara established the UQ/Caxton Human Rights Project, along with Bridget Burton at Caxton Legal Centre. This project is staffed by volunteer law students and makes information on every case that refers to the Human Rights Act 2019 (Qld) publicly available: https://law.uq.edu.au/human-rights-cases.
Tamara is currently undertaking an ARC Linkage project on human rights dispute resolution in Australia (2023-2025). She has recently completed an ARC Linkage project on the criminalisation of poverty and homelessness in Australia (2017-2021).
Tamara undertakes pro bono legal practice in the area of child protection, and she lectures in human rights law, and child and family law. Tamara also runs the UQ Law School's clinical legal education program.
