Carolyn Evans New Dean of Melbourne Law School

I am delighted to announce that my colleague Carolyn Evans has been appointed Dean of the Melbourne Law School — the first female Dean in the law school’s history.  Carolyn is one of the world’s leading law and religion scholars, as her biography attests:

Carolyn has degrees in Arts and Law from Melbourne University and a doctorate from Oxford University where she studied as a Rhodes Scholar and where she held a stipendiary lectureship for two years before returning to Melbourne in 2000. She also qualified to practice law and is a barrister and solicitor of the Supreme Court of Victoria. In 2010, Carolyn was awarded a Fulbright Senior Scholarship to allow her to travel as a Visiting Fellow at American and Emory Universities to examine questions of comparative religious freedom.

Carolyn is the author of Religious Freedom under the European Court of Human Rights (OUP 2001) and co-author of Australian Bills of Rights: The Law of the Victorian Charter and the ACT Human Rights Act (LexisNexis 2008). She is co-editor of  Religion and International Law (1999, Kluwer); Mixed Blessings: Laws, Religions and Women’s Rights in the Asia-Pacific Region (2006 Martinus Nijhoff) and Law and Religion in Historical and Theoretical Perspective (CUP 2008). She is an internationally recognised expert on religious freedom and the relationship between law and religion and has spoken on these topics in the United States, United Kingdom, Russia, China, Greece, Vietnam, India, Hong Kong, Switzerland, Malaysia, Nepal and Australia.

As readers know, I was a big fan of James Hathaway, our previous Dean. I’m glad that our law school will continue to be in such capable hands!