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Professor Rick Bigwood’s principal teaching and research interests lie in the areas of contract and property law. He was formerly a Senior Solicitor and Acting Principal Solicitor with the Federal Attorney-General's Department in Canberra (Office of Commercial Law). Before joining TC Beirne School of Law, Professor Bigwood taught at Bond University for five years, and he was on the Auckland Law Faculty for 16 years before that, where he was also the Director of the Research Centre for Business Law. He has published widely in leading international journals on subjects within contract, equity and property law, and he has been a keynote speaker at international conferences on contract law. His publications include the following books: Legal Method in New Zealand (Butterworths, 2001); Exploitative Contracts (Oxford University Press, 2003) (awarded the JF Northey Memorial Book Award for 2003); The Statute: Making and Meaning (LexisNexis, 2004); Public Interest Litigation: The New Zealand Experience in International Perspective (LexisNexis, 2006); The Permanent New Zealand Court of Appeal: Essays on the First 50 Years (Hart Publishing, 2009); Contract as Assumption: Essays on a Theme (by Brian Coote) (Hart Publishing, 2010); The Law of Remedies: New Directions in the Common Law (Irwin Law, 2010) (with Jeff Berryman); and Cheshire & Fifoot, Law of Contract (10th Australian edition, 2012) (with Nick Seddon). Professor Bigwood was formerly the General Editor of the New Zealand Universities Law Review, and was Editor of the New Zealand Law Review 2002-2008. He is currently a member of the editorial boards of the New Zealand Universities Law Review and the Journal of Contract Law. Professor Bigwood has received a number of awards, prizes and honours for his teaching at various tertiary educational institutions, in a variety of countries, including a National Tertiary Teaching Excellence Award in 2006 (New Zealand).

I am a Lecturer in the TC Beirne School of Law. I teach Trusts and Equity, although I am interested in all areas of private law and private law theory.

My PhD research evaluated the High Court's reliance on the principle of 'coherence' in private law adjudication. Parts of this research have been published in leading journals, such as the Melbourne University Law Review and the University of Toronto Law Journal.

Dr Brydon Wang is an author, lawyer, and scholar researching the trustworthy regulation of technology. His work focuses on how we design and govern benevolent data structures and decision-making systems that support human-centric, climate-resilient cities. Dually qualified in law and architecture, Brydon brings more than twenty years of experience across construction, legal practice, and academia. He is currently an Associate Director at KPMG, advising on major infrastructure transactions, and an Honorary Fellow at the Centre for Policy Futures at the University of Queensland.

​Brydon’s research investigates how regulation can increase the perceived trustworthiness of decision-makers, particularly in contexts of automated systems and informational asymmetry. His interdisciplinary methods blend doctrinal legal analysis with creative research strategies. He was lead editor of Automating Cities: Design, Construction, Operation and Future Impact (Springer, 2021) and lead editor of the forthcoming Large Floating Solutions (Springer, 2025), a volume exploring sustainable marine infrastructure and governance, that follows on from the previous edited collection Large Floating Structures: Technological Advances (Springer 2015). His work has been featured by the Centre for Digital Built Britain (Cambridge University), The Conversation, ABC Radio National’s Future Tense, and Seeker’s How Close Are We to Living in the Ocean?

Before joining KPMG, Brydon taught contract law, data privacy, and AI regulation at the Queensland University of Technology, where he received the 2024 Vice Chancellor’s Award for Early Career Teaching. He also taught Responsible Data Science in UQ’s Master of Data Science programme. His PhD thesis, The Role of Trustworthiness in Automated Decision-making Systems and the Law, was awarded the 2022 Faculty of Business and Law Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Award. His research combines doctrinal legal research with creative research methodologies to explore the governance of automation, digital infrastructure, and smart urban systems. Through his creative research strategies, Brydon has also become an award-winning artist.

​Brydon began his career in architecture and contract administration on award-winning construction projects, before practising as a technology and construction lawyer at Allens Linklaters. He remains passionate about integrating policy, law, and infrastructure to ensure technological systems are designed with trust and transparency at their core.