Dr Eve Lester is a public and international lawyer with a background in refugee, migration and human rights law, policy and practice spanning more than 30 years.
Eve's academic research builds upon her experience in public and international legal policy and practice, particularly in relation to the human rights of refugees and migrants. Her book, Making Migration Law: The Foreigner, Sovereignty and the Case of Australia (CUP, 2018) draws on her experience as a legal practitioner and explores how it has become possible for Australia to make some of the world’s harshest asylum policies. Her research methodology brought together genealogy and critical discourse analysis.
Eve's DECRA Fellowship aims to establish a socio-legal account of the arrival in Australia of a group of Cambodian ‘boat people’ from 1989. Her research interweaves archival and oral history sources with a view not only to documenting these events but also to showing how those affected experienced and remember them. Again, this research is shaped by Eve’s experience as a legal practitioner, in particular her work representing Cambodian people who arrived in Australia by boat in the early 1990s and her later work with refugees in Cambodia.
Eve is also working with a team of scholars on a project entitled Rewriting Jurisprudence: Centring Refugee and Migrant Lived Experience. The purpose of the project is to rethink, reframe and rewrite jurisprudence from the perspectives of scholars and lawyers with lived experience of forced displacement (refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs)), statelessness and migration. Some refugee and migration law judgments have been rewritten from queer and feminist perspectives, but this is the first project in which judgments are critiqued and rewritten by scholars and lawyers with lived experience of forced displacement, migration and statelessness.
Prior to coming to academia, Eve worked in Australia and internationally in the community legal sector, with leading international NGOs (including Amnesty International, Human Rights First, and the Jesuit Refugee Service), and has consulted to NGOs, as well as to the UN and to governments as an independent adviser. In 2020, Eve received a Myer Innovation Fellowship to support a project to develop digital technology for monitoring human rights conditions in immigration detention.
Outside Australia, Eve’s work has taken her to Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe, and the Pacific in a range of capacities in the non-government sector, with the UN, and as an independent adviser to governments. At ANU, she currently teaches Australian Public Law. She has also taught at the Australian Catholic University, New York University, and the University of New South Wales. She teaches periodically at the International Institute for Humanitarian Law, San Remo, Italy.
For more in relation to Eve's work see: www.evelester.com
Appointments
Significant research publications
Book
Book chapters
Refereed journal articles
View more publications on the ANU Researchers website
View more publications on the ANU Researchers website
Link to ANU researchers profile
Research biography
Eve researches and writes on the historical development and current impact of domestic and international law and policy on people seeking asylum, refugees, and migrants. Her research methods include critical discourse analysis, genealogy, and institutional (archival) and oral history.
Eve's academic research builds upon her experience in public and international legal policy and practice, particularly in relation to the human rights of refugees and migrants. Her book, Making Migration Law: The Foreigner, Sovereignty and the Case of Australia (CUP, 2018) draws on her experience as a legal practitioner and explores how it has become possible for Australia to make some of the world’s harshest asylum policies.
Eve's DECRA Fellowship, Looking Back, Thinking Ahead: A Socio-Legal Account of Cambodian ‘boat people’, aims to establish a socio-legal account of the arrival in Australia of a group of Cambodian ‘boat people’ from 1989. Her research interweaves archival and oral history sources and methodologies with a view not only to documenting these events but also to showing how those affected experienced and remember them. Again, this research project is shaped by Eve’s experience as a legal practitioner, in particular her work representing Cambodian people who arrived in Australia by boat in the early 1990s and her later work with refugees seeking asylum in Cambodia.
Research projects & collaborations
Grants
Consultancies
Prior to coming to academia, Eve consulted to a range of NGOs in Australia and internationally, as well as to the UN and governments. Published outputs include the following:
Books & edited collections
Refereed journal articles
Book chapters
Conference papers & presentations
Committees
EXTERNAL ORGANISATIONS
INTERNAL ANU COMMITTEES
PhD supervision
While undertaking my DECRA Fellowship, I am unavailable for supervision.
I have previously supervised:
Past courses
How my works connects with public policy
My background in legal practice and policy in Australia and internationally informs my research, which is always minded to its international and domestic public policy impact. In a range of capacities, I have been engaged over many years in refugee, migration, and human rights legal and policy processes domestically, regionally, and internationally. As part of my current research, I am engaged in the development of international and domestic policy guidance on ensuring that asylum policy is historically informed, both nationally and internationally.
