Academic staff members of the Academic Board

I teach administrative law, legal theory and negotiation/mediation in the law school and am developing a unit in strategic negotiation in the MBA, and would like to develop a unit in the cultural context of negotiation in an on-line/video-conferenced format with a Canadian law school. I have taught at Deakin since February 2001.

I hold graduate degrees in law, politics, history and, soon education. My doctorate is in modern European intellectual history which I completed in Canada at the end of the 1980s and at a time when there were few academic jobs in the discipline; as a result, I slipped into the study of law, also in Canada, and practiced at the Ontario Bar in the area of civil and family law before escaping into university teaching with the aid of an LL M in administrative law; also from a Canadian school.

My academic interests are interdisciplinary in nature: I enjoy migrating across the borders of legal theory/education, negotiation and workplace learning in the context of higher education. I strongly disagree with the corporate drift of the tertiary sector and its anti-intellectual +pro-business predilections. I am pleasantly surprised that a number of my students are also interested in challenging the dominant ways of thinking in legal education and are interested in pursuing diverse curricular practices, and in ways that query the bureaucratic conceptions of the purpose of higher education as expressed in the overly prescriptive, instrumentalized and market-driven view of graduate attributes.