Dr Susan Bartie is a legal historian at the School of Law in the College of Arts, Law and Education. She is currently developing a 50-year socio-legal history of Australia’s environmental lawyers, with the aim of creating new resources to benefit the environment and the community.  From 2022 this project will be supported by a Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) from the Australian Research Council.

Biography

Dr Susan Bartie is a legal historian who has spent the last decade studying the intellectual agendas, social relations and endeavours that have accompanied the rapid growth in the size and stature of law schools in the 20^th century. Her book, Free Hands and Minds - Pioneering Australian Legal Scholars (Hart Publishing, 2019), is the first work to study in depth, the ideas and endeavours of three Australian legal scholars, and their contributions to liberal and progressive legal culture and Australia’s discipline of law.

Recently Susan, along with David Sandomierski, created a network of legal historians to examine a common element within legal education systems: US influence. Their book, Legal Education Abroad – Critical Histories,  is designed to provide stronger understandings of the degrees of global homogeneity and local distinctiveness among legal educational systems, uncovering the reasons why certain models, practices and ideas have emerged.

Susan is a committed law teacher who draws on her broader studies of the discipline to inform her teaching. She has been awarded citations for outstanding contributions to student learning from the Commonwealth Department of Education and Training (2016) as well as from the Vice Chancellor at the University of Tasmania (2015). She received a full British Chevening Scholarship to study a Masters of Law at the University of Cambridge and was awarded a Dean’s Commendation for her PhD in legal history. She has practised law as a litigator, working on cases litigated in English, Australian and Hong Kong courts, and began her career as an associate to a Federal Court judge.

Career summary

Qualifications

Teaching

Teaching expertise

Susan has channelled her interests in the history, present and future of lawyering into the subject, Law and Social Change, designed to provide her students with a deeper appreciation of the social, intellectual and political issues they will encounter following their studies.

She also co-ordinates a large compulsory legal reasoning subject that adopts interactive methods (both face to face and online) to promote an emphasis on student learning. The subject also concentrates on technological change within the field of legal reasoning.