Professor Alison Duxbury
The Dean of Melbourne Law School is a central figure in guiding the academic and professional development of aspiring legal minds.
Alison Duxbury is a Professor at Melbourne Law School and the President of the Australian and New Zealand Society of International Law. She has previously held the positions of Associate Dean (JD) and Deputy Dean at Melbourne Law School, as well as Chair of the International Board of the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative and Associate Director of the Asia Pacific Centre for Military Law.
Alison's major teaching and research interests are in the fields of international law, international institutional law, human rights law and public law. Her publications include The Participation of States in International Organisations: The Role of Human Rights and Democracy (Cambridge, 2011), a co-edited collection, Military Justice in the Modern Age (Cambridge, 2016), and a co-authored book, Can ASEAN Take Human Rights Seriously? (Cambridge, 2019). Together with Dr Madelaine Chiam, Alison is currently editing a collection, Australia and the International Legal System: From Empire to the Contemporary World, to be published by Hart.
In the 2023-2024 academic year Alison was a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College and a Visiting Scholar at the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights, University of Oxford. She has also been a Visiting Fellow at the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law in Cambridge, the Centre for Comparative and Public Law at the University of Hong Kong, the Oxford Institute for Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict, and the Institute of Commonwealth Studies in London.
Alison has taught at the Centre for Transnational Legal Studies (London) and Auckland Law School. She is the recipient of a Melbourne Teaching Citation, the Barbara Falk Award for Teaching Excellence and a National Citation for Outstanding Contributions to Student Learning.
Alison holds BA/LLB (Hons) and PhD degrees from the University of Melbourne and an LLM from the University of Cambridge, where she was a Pegasus Cambridge Commonwealth Scholar. Prior to joining Melbourne Law School, Alison worked at Blake Dawson Waldron (now Ashurst), the London office of Clifford Chance and Monash University.