Law research in the Faculty

Associate Professor Georgina Dimopoulos

Georgina's Research Profile
Georgina Dimopoulos

Associate Professor Jennifer Nielsen

Jennifer's Research Profile
Jennifer

Dr Rohan B.E. Price

Rohan's Research Profile
Rohan headshot

Associate Professor Mark Wellard

Mark's Research Profile
Mark Wellard

Dr Georgina Dimopoulos

Dr Georgina Dimopoulos is an Australian lawyer and a socio-legal academic. She is a Senior Lecturer in Law, Faculty of Business, Law and Arts and a Research Associate, Centre for Children and Young People, at Southern Cross University.

Georgina is experienced in legal and policy evaluation, and doctrinal, qualitative and empirical research, across the areas of family law, children's rights, family violence and privacy.

She is also a member of the Policy Working Group of the Australian Child Rights Taskforce.

Georgina's research has been published in leading Australian and international peer-reviewed journals. Her first monograph, Decisional Privacy and the Rights of the Child (Routledge, 2022), presents a new model for enabling and listening to children’s voices in decision-making.

Georgina was admitted to legal practice in 2010 and practised at Allens Arthur Robinson (now Allens Linklaters). She has worked as a Senior Associate to a Justice of the Supreme Court of Victoria, a Senior Legal Policy Officer at the Victorian Department of Justice and Community Safety, and a Research Fellow in the Family Law, Family Violence and Elder Abuse team at the Australian Institute of Family Studies. She has also been engaged as a legal consultant to the Victorian Family Law Pathways Network and Women with Disabilities Victoria.

Georgina is passionate about children’s right to participate meaningfully and safely in decision-making about their lives and about creating the conditions to enable children and young people to enjoy and exercise this right. The focus of her current research is on translating children’s rights into practice in the family law and family violence system contexts. This involves addressing the various conceptual, policy/legislative and practical barriers to children’s participation.

Georgina holds a PhD in Law, a Bachelor of Laws (First Class Honours) and a Bachelor of Arts (Media and Communications), from the University of Melbourne.

Honours / post graduate topics for supervision:
  • Family law
  • Children’s rights
  • Family violence
  • Privacy
Featured research work:

Decisional Privacy and the Rights of the Child (Routledge, 2022)

Grants:
2023

Cook, K., Burgin, R. and Dimopoulos, G. Developing Systemic Interventions for Intimate Partner Financial Abuse. Australian Research Council Discovery 2024. $379,860
2023 Dimopoulos, G., and ter Vrugt, P. Promoting Children’s Voices in Australian Family Law Decision-making: Co-Designing A Participation Toolkit with Children as Experts by Experience. University of Maastricht, Children’s Rights Research Fund. €4,750
2022
Dimopoulos, G., Burgin, R. and Adams, M. Children’s Voices for Change: A Rights-Based Approach to Understanding and Implementing Effective Supports for Children and Pre-Adolescents as Victim-Survivors of Family Violence. Family Safety Victoria, Family Violence Research Grants Program: Phase 1. $189,634
2022

Burgin, R., Dimopoulos, G. and Adams, M. Strengthening Victoria’s Family Violence Risk Assessment and Information Sharing: Understanding Effective Capability Building to Support MARAM Implementation through the Experiences of Victim-Survivors. Family Safety Victoria, Family Violence Research Grants Program: Phase 1. $197,024
2022 Dimopoulos, G. The Right Time for Rights? Use of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child in Australian Family Law Decision-Making. Socio-Legal Studies Association UK. £1,485
2020

Sherry, E., Symons, K and Dimopoulos, G. AFL Youth Mentoring Pilot Program. Australian Football League. $27,000
2020 Giordano, S., Gillam, L., Taylor-Sands, M., Notini, L., Telfer, M., Pang, K., Dimopoulos, G., Holm, S., Garland, F., Bennett, R., and Horowicz, E. Ethico-Legal Issues in Medical Treatment of Gender Diverse Children. Melbourne-Manchester Research Seed Fund. $8,586
Contact Dr Georgina Dimopoulos:

georgina.dimopoulos@scu.edu.au

Associate Professor Jennifer Nielsen

Jennifer Nielsen is a lawyer and legal educator with SCU, and has taught and researched across a range of subjects related to First Peoples and law. She has a sustained record of innovation and academic leadership in teaching, research, community engagement and grant funding.

As a socio-legal scholar, she engages law critically. Her work applies critical race and whiteness theory to reveal the normative standards inherent in Anglo-Australian law that privilege ‘white’ interests in preference to those of First Peoples and other ‘non-white’ groups.

Co-authored with Dr Deb Bargallie, she contributed a re-written judgment and commentary of ‘Aldridge v Department of Corrective Services’ in Watson, N, and Douglas, H eds. Indigenous Legal Judgments: Bringing Indigenous Voices into Judicial Decision Making (Routledge, 2021). In 2014, she contributed a rewritten judgement of ‘McLeod v Power’ to The Australian Feminist Judgments Project: Writing and Re-writing Law (with Professor Katharine Gelber; Douglas, Hunter, Luker, & Bartlett (eds), 2014).

She is an Executive Committee member of the Law and Society Association of Australia and New Zealand (LSAANZ), as well as a member of the Australian Labour Law Association (ALLA) and the Law & Society Association (LSA).

Jennifer’s work reflects her commitment to social justice and inclusion.

Honours / post graduate topics for supervision:
  • Critical Race and whiteness theory
  • Anti-racism
  • First Peoples and the Law
  • Discrimination
  • Employment and Industrial Relations
  • Access to Justice
Featured research work:

'The Problem with Research', in Dorota Gozdecka and Anne Macduff (eds), Feminism, Postfeminism and Legal Theory: Beyond the Gendered Subject (Routledge, 2019) 117-136
The problem with research | 8 | Feminism, Postfeminism and Legal Theory (taylorfrancis.com)

Grants:
2014 LIEF/ LE15 “The Australasian Legal History Libraries: Stage II”, Australian Research Council, Chief Investigators: Professor Graham Greenleaf (UNSW), et al: Granted $410,000
2011 Australian Learning and Teaching Council “Rethinking law curriculum: developing strategies to prepare law graduates for practice in rural and regional Australia”; Dr Amanda Kennedy (UNE), Project Participants: Dr Theresa Smith-Ruig; Dr Jennifer Nielsen; Mr Richard Coverdale; Dr Claire Macken; Ms Caroline Hart; Professor Reid Mortensen; and Ms Trish Mundy: Granted: $133,000
1999 Federal Attorney General's Department, National Quality Assurance in Clinical Legal Education “A Model Assessment Practice”, with Hayley Katzen: Granted: $10,000
1994 NSW Ministry for the Status and Advancement of Women “Women’s experiences of gender bias in the civil litigation System in regional and rural communities”: Granted: $12,000

Jennifer.nielsen@scu.edu.au

Dr Rohan B.E. Price

Rohan has written several acclaimed books on the colonial history of the British Empire including Violence and Emancipation in Colonial Ideology: Hong Kong and British Malaya (CityU Press), Resistance in Colonial and Communist China: Anatomy of a Riot (1950-1963) (Routledge), The False Past: A Nietzschean Account of Australian Settler Colonialism (Peter Lang, USA) and Nietzsche, Heidegger and Colonialism (Routledge).

Rohan’s current book projects are Being in the Colonies: Singapore, Western Australia and Tasmania (Peter Lang) and All the Suffering that there is: New thought on war crimes.

Rohan's most recent project, Being in the Colonies, views British settlers and colonised people as equally amenable to Being developed via contests for convenience and freedom through violence. By arguing that Being is jeopardised by overdetermined violent behaviour, his new project contends that justice is only possible by maintaining a relativity and fluidity in the possession of Being based on proportional violence.

An accessible collection of Rohan’s writing is available here: https://medium.com/@rohanprice

Honours / post graduate topics for supervision:
  • Legal philosophy
  • Legal history of British Empire
Contact Dr Rohan B.E. Price:

rohan.price@scu.edu.au

Associate Professor Mark Wellard

Mark Wellard is a published insolvency law academic with a national profile in academia and the profession. Mark is an active academic member and former Legal Director of ARITA, Australia's peak professional association for insolvency practitioners and is a member of The Law Council of Australia's Insolvency & Restructuring Committee. Before moving to the higher education sector, Mark practised as a senior insolvency lawyer with leading law firms in Australia and the UK (including as Senior Associate of King & Wood Mallesons).

Amid increasing momentum for wholesale insolvency law reform (eg, the 2023 PJC Inquiry Report into Corporate Insolvency in Australia), the issues of creditor protection and director accountability in corporate insolvency sometimes are overshadowed by industry focus on the corporate rescue and turnaround narrative. Striking the right balance in our corporate insolvency laws is necessary so that diligent company directors are supported in attempts to rescue distressed businesses while at the same time directors who abuse the use of the corporate form are properly held accountable.

Honours / post graduate topics for supervision:
  • Corporate insolvency law and personal insolvency (bankruptcy) law.
Featured research work:

Citations of Mark Wellard's Research

Grants:

ARITA 2013 Terry Taylor Scholarship ($10,000)

This scholarship funded by ARITA supported Mark’s research into deeds of company arrangement under Part 5.3A of Australia’s Corporations Act. The Research Report is on ARITA’s website and was cited in numerous submissions to the Commonwealth Government’s 2014 Financial System Inquiry and received coverage in the Australian Financial Review.

Contact Assoc Prof Mark Wellard:

mark.wellard@scu.edu.au

For more detailed info on our researchers please visit the SCU Researcher Profile Portal.