Health Law: Frameworks and Context

Anne-Maree Farrell is Professor and Chair of Health Law and Society, ARC Future Fellow, and Director of the Centre for Health Law and Society, La Trobe University, Victoria. Prior to becoming an academic, she worked as a lawyer in private legal practice, specialising in mass torts, product liability and medical negligence. Her research expertise is in health law, policy and ethics. She has specific interests in law and the human body (blood, organ, cells), health technologies, the management of public health risks, and medical injury. Her books include Pioneering Healthcare Law: Essays in Honour of Margaret Brazier (co-edited with C. Stanton, S. Devaney and A. Mullock, 2016), European Law and New Health Technologies (co-edited with M. Flear, T. Hervey and M. Murphy, 2013), The Politics of Blood: Ethics Innovation and the Regulation of Risk (Cambridge, 2012), and Organ Shortage: Ethics Law and Pragmatism (co-edited with M. Flear, T. Hervey and M. Murphy, Cambridge, 2011). She has received funding for her research from the Australian Research Council, the UK Wellcome Trust, the UK Economic and Social Research Council, and the Nuffield Foundation. She is currently undertaking an ARC Future Fellowship which examines law, regulation and politics involving the human body.

John Devereux is Professor of Law at the University of Queensland. A Rhodes Scholar, he has degrees in Arts and Law from the University of Queensland, and a Doctor of Philosophy of Law undertaken at Magdalen College, Oxford. Devereux has been a Member of the Health Quality and Complaints Commission, Queensland, a Law Refrom Commissioner for Queensland, and a Member of the Social Security Appeals Tribunal. He currently serves as a Member of the Administrative Appeals Tribunal. He is the author of over ninety notes, articles, reports, book chapters and books, and his writings have been cited by Superior Courts.

Isabel Karpin researches on the bioethical implications of laws governing reproductive technologies, genetic testing and disability. She explores the challenge posed by new biotechnological developments on legal understandings of normality, disability, individuality, and family. She also teaches disability and the law and genetics and the law. She has a BA and LLB from the University of Sydney, a Masters of Law from Harvard University, Massachusetts, and a Doctorate (JSD) from Columbia University, New York. Professor Karpin joined the faculty of law at the University of Technology, Sydney in February 2009 having previously worked at the University of Sydney from 1994 to 2008. Professor Karpin is the author and co-author of articles, book chapters and books including Perfecting Pregnancy: Law Disability and the Future of Reproduction (with K. Savell, Cambridge, 2012), as well as edited collections such as The 'Healthy' Embryo (with Jeff Nisker, Françoise Baylis, Carolyn McLeod and Roxanne Mykitiuk, Cambridge, 2010). She is currently involved in two major Australian Research Council projects, one exploring the regulation of behaviour as a disability and the other examining family formation using reproductive technology both inside and outside law and across borders.

Penelope Weller is the director of the Juris Doctor in the Graduate School of Business and Law at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT). Weller is an international expert on the Convention on the Rights of Person with Disablities and mental health law reform. She teaches human rights law, administrative law, and jurisprudence. She is Chair of the RMIT College of Business Human Research Ethics Committee. Recent journal papers include 'The Contradictions of Gender: Mental health Research, Policy, Law and Human Rights' (in the Griffith Law Review, 2016), 'Legal Capacity and Access to Justice: The Right To Participation in the CRPD' (in Laws, 2016) and 'Governmentality and the CRPD: A Radical Critique of Disability in Law (in Griffith Law Review, 2014). Her books include New Law and Ethics in Mental Health Advance Directives: The Convention on the Rights of Person with Disabilities and the Right to Choose (2013) and Rights Based Mental Health Laws (with Bernadette McSherry, 2010). Professor Weller was previously the Deputy Director of the Center for Advancement of Law and Mental Health in the Faculty of Law at Monash University, Victoria.