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).
Dr Vicky Comino is a Senior Lecturer at the TC Beirne School of Law at The University of Queensland. Dr Comino's main research area is corporate law, and in particular the regulation of corporate misconduct. Before commencing an academic career, she practised as a solicitor working at a top tier law firm in the fields of corporate law, leasing, commercial and residential conveyancing, strata development, securities and opinion work. Over the years, Dr Comino has worked voluntarily for Legal Aid, South Brisbane Immigration & Community Legal Service, Women's Equal Opportunity (WEO) and Justice and the Law Society (JATL) (UQ). She has also served on numerous committees, most recently as the chair of a major Queensland Law Society accreditation committee for the accreditation of lawyers as Business Law Specialists. Dr Comino's recent articles have addressed important topics in the corporations law area. Those topics include the difficulties facing the use of civil penalties by calling for Parliament to pass legislation to resolve procedural obstacles, the adequacy of ASIC's 'tool-kit' to deal with corporate and financial wrongdoing, including the deployment of 'new' enforcement tools, such as enforceable undertakings and the possibilities and limits of the use of 'corporate culture' as a regulatory mechanism. Her 2015 monograph Australia's "Company Law Watchdog" – ASIC and Corporate Regulation, which focuses on exploring how, and to what extent, a public authority like ASIC can achieve more effective regulation certainly comes at a time when ASIC's performance is increasingly under the microscope. This is in view of its mixed record of success in some highly publicised cases and a seemingly endless procession of corporate and financial scandals, such as those that engulfed the major Australian banks, prompting not only a number of parliamentary inquiries into ASIC's performance and capabilities, but the establishment of the Royal Commission into Misconduct in the Banking, Superannuation and Financial Services Industry. Her book also consolidates her position as a leading Australian researcher on corporate regulation, with her work cited in the Final Report of the Banking Royal Commission and reports of the Australian Law Reform Commission on Corporate Criminal Responsibility. Dr Comino's research has global relevance and she has extended her work beyond Australia to evaluate international developments, especially in the US and the UK. She is examining the different responses of regulators to the dilemmas presented by policing corporate and securities violations in the aftermath of, and since, the GFC to try to resolve the issue of how policy-makers and regulators should deal with corporate wrongdoing more effectively in the future. She also travelled to the UK in 2018 after being awarded a Liberty Fellowship from the University of Leeds to undertake collaborative work comparing corporate regulation there and in Australia. Dr Comino holds the degrees of BA, LLB (Hons), LLM and PhD (UQ), and is a Fellow of the Australian Centre for Private Law (UQ).
Professor Ross Grantham’s principal research interests are in the fields of corporate governance and the private law. He has published extensively in the area of the duties of company directors, as well as on matters dealing with the theoretical nature of the company and the implications of this nature for the integration of the company as a juristic entity into the general legal system. He has also published extensively on developments in the law of unjust enriched and restitution, particularly the interface between restitution and the law of property, and on the theoretical and philosophical basis of the private law.
In addition to his many articles in leading international journals, Professor Grantham is the author of a number of monographs and casebooks, and he has edited a number of collections of essays. Professor Grantham is a member of the editorial boards of a number of leading international journals.
Professor Grantham holds degrees from Oxford University, the University of Auckland and the University of Queensland, and has held senior management positions at both the University of Auckland and the University of Queensland.
Dr Barbora Jedlickova joined the TC Beirne School of Law as an Associate Lecturer in 2011. She specialises in competition law, with principle research interests in competition-law theories, competition law in the digital economy and comparative competition law. Her research has focused on various topics, including cartels, vertical restraints, bargaining power, and economic and jurisprudential theories and arguments in competition law. Her research also includes the analysis of specific markets with distinctive issues, such the grocery retail market, the pharmaceutical market and the telecommunications market. She has published both internationally and nationally. Her publications include a research monograph Resale Price Maintenance and Vertical Territorial Restrictions: Theory and Practice in EU Competition Law and US Antitrust Law published by Edward Elgar Publishing.
Dr Jedlickova's engagement and research are both nationally and internationally orientated. She is a member of the Competition and Consumer Committee of the Law Council of Australia. She has visited several European and US institutions as a visiting scholar, including the University of Iowa, Boston University and the Court of Justice of the European Union. She is a member of a number of national and international associations. She has also been an active member of the International League of Competition Law (LIDC) and has been involved in several international LIDC projects. Together with 17 senior competition-law experts, Dr Jedlickova has been working towards establishing LIDC Australia and New Zealand, the first LIDC group in Australia and New Zealand linked to international LIDC.
Dr Jedlickova has served as an Editor of the Oceania Column of Competition Policy International (‘CPI’) and as a General Editor of the LAWASIA Journal. Dr Jedlickova is a Fellow of the Centre for Public, International and Comparative Law (CPILC) and a Fellow of the Australian Centre for Private Law at the TC Beirne School of Law.
Dr Jedlickova holds degrees from the University of Glasgow in the UK (PhD in Law, 2012; and LL.M. with Commendation in International Competition Law and Policy, 2007) and from Masaryk University in the Czech Republic (2004). Prior to her academic career, she worked as a Lawyer in the Czech Republic and as a Contracts Officer/Assistant Contracts Manager at both the University of St Andrews and the University of Glasgow in the UK. In 2009, she was a trainee (a blue-book 'stagiaire') of DG Competition at the European Commission in Brussels.
Dr Thea Voogt is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Law and the Director of Business Law.
She specialises in income tax law, agriculture tax policy tools, the impact of climate change on the financial fortitude of farming families, corporate governance and business structures.
Thea leverages her significant business experience in senior executive roles and her background as a chartered accountant in industry projects. She holds a Doctorate in Financial Management and Master of International Commercial Law (UQ).
Thea is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and an award-winning law teacher. She is the 2017 recipient of the prestigious UQ Business, Economics & Law Faculty Teaching Award. She also received the 2017 Inspired me to learn Award for Teaching Excellence in an undergraduate compulsory course, and the 2016 Award for Teaching Excellence in an undergraduate compulsory course from the UQ School of Law.
Prior to joining UQ, Thea was the CEO (Principal Officer) of the superannuation funds of the University of Johannesburg, a Professor in Accounting and managed large tenders for this institution. Over the course of her career in South Africa, she was closely involved with the South African Institute of Chartered Accountants as sought-after speaker, researcher and umpire for the national qualifying exams for chartered accountants. Thea also held a Ministerial appointment to the Board of the South African Qualifications Authority (SAQA).
