Appointed Dean of Law in 2017, Professor Tania Leiman pioneered the introduction in 2020 of Flinders Law's highly innovative new undergraduate law curriculum. She is committed to growing legal professionals who can identify opportunities for innovation, understand impacts of emerging technologies and use this knowledge and skill to increase access to justice. Justice requires a focus not just on law and regulation, but on awareness of rights and obligations, viability of economic opportunities for communities, participation and partnerships for shared governance and the sustainability of our environment.

Tania has received multiple individual and team national, university and faculty teaching excellence awards. She is a Teaching Specialist (Clinical Practitioner) with a focus on Clinical Legal Education. She supervises honours students researching the legal implications of emerging technologies.

Tania holds a current unrestricted practising certificate, is a member of the award-winning Flinders Legal Centre's Executive Management and was a supervising solicitor there from 2012-2016.

Tania's current interests include future mobility solutions (including automated vehicles and hyperloop technologies), disruption in the legal profession, artificial intelligence and legal tech, and the future of legal education. She sits as SA representative on the National Advisory Board of the Australian Society for Computers and Law. She serves on the National Transport Commission's Automated Vehicles Industry Insights Group. She is a member of the Legal sub-group of the Australian Driverless Vehicle Initiative [ADVI]’s Policy & Risk Group.

Following an earlier career in private legal practice, Tania continues to undertake legal consultancy work, particularly in relation to legal implications of grey fleet & light fleet, and regulatory issues re future mobility technologies.

Publications available here.

After completing his undergraduate education in computing and law at the University of Tasmania, James undertook a PhD with Professor Dianne Nicol and Associate Professor Jane Nielsen at the Centre of Law and Genetics, with Associate Professor Michael Charleston as a research supervisor. James's thesis focused on the relationships between informal norms and formal intellectual property rights in open source bioinformatics development.

James then completed a two year postdoctoral research fellowship at the Health Ethics and Policy Laboratory in the Department of Health Sciences and Technology, ETH Zurich, headed by Professor Effy Vayena. James worked with the Laboratory for Data Security, headed by Professor Jean-Pierre Hubaux, as well as the Lausanne University Hospital, on the Data Protection and Personalised Health Project. The purpose of this project was to develop a set of privacy enhancing tools for distributed queries on medical data. James conducted the ethical and legal assessment as part of this project.

James's research interests include intellectual property and industrial property law (with a specific focus on software and biotechnology inventions), data protection law and health law. James's research interests also extend to bioethics, institutional economics (such as common pool resource theory) and the application of these fields to these areas of law. James is topic coordinator for Torts and Advanced Legal Research. In addition, James teaches Law in a Digital Age as part of the Flinders University future focused law degree.

Judith graduated from Adelaide Law School and was admitted to practise as a solicitor in New South Wales in 1993. After admission, she was a solicitor, then a legal officer and consultant with the Australian Copyright Council in Sydney. Judith taught at the University of Western Sydney Nepean, Flinders University and Adelaide University before returning to Flinders University to take up the role of Teaching Program Director in Law in 2020 and teach Administrative Law. Judith’s publications can be seen here including: Judith Bannister, Anna Olijnyk and Stephen McDonald, Government Accountability: Australian Administrative Law Cambridge University Press, 2nd ed 2018.

Rob brings a varied and extensive professional background to bear in his teaching and aims to give students insights into real practice situations to help prepare them for their futures.

He has worked as a lawyer, educator, manager, company director and commercial advisor across a broad range of fields including defence, agriculture and health. He has special depth in intellectual property, technology and commercialisation and is particularly interested in the interaction between the development of technology, society and regulation.