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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).

Dr Kate Falconer is a Lecturer at the TC Beirne School of Law. Her research interests lie in the law of the dead and bodily disposal, and the ways in which the private law interacts with death, the dead, and dead bodies. She is particularly interested in the impacts and implications of new death technologies both for private law and society more broadly. Kate is the Secretary of the Australian Death Studies Society.

Kate has presented papers at conferences both in Australia and internationally, and has held visiting research positions at Queens University Belfast and the Hastings Center in New York. Her PhD, which focused on possessory rights and interests in the deceased human body and the implications of these interests for property theory, was awarded by the Australian National University in 2020. Kate also holds an LLM in US Law from Washington University in St Louis, as well as an LLB with Honours and an undergraduate degree in archaeology from the University of Queensland. She currently teaches Trusts and Equity.