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Research biography

Susan's research seeks to change the way we think about lawyers and to scrutinise their central contributions to society. Her current historical study of 50 years of Australian environmental lawyering (1970-2020) aims to develop and preserve an unprecedented data set of environmental lawyers over multiple generations. It is designed to create important new knowledge, challenging the common and limited treatment of lawyers as mere instruments of social causes and revealing a novel, and previously unexplored, layer of environmental governance. This new knowledge can be used by environmentalists, researchers and policy makers to better understand and engage with this important class of social reformers. It can also inform environmental advocacy, governance and environmental protection. In 2021 this project received $451,711DECRA (Discovery Early Career Researcher Award) funding from the Australian Research Council.

Research projects & collaborations

Susan 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 20th 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.

Grants

• Awarded $451,711 DECRA (Discovery Early Career Researcher Award) funding from the Australian Research Council to develop a 50-year socio-legal history of Australian Environmental Lawyers (2022-2024).
• Awarded $25,000AUD (approx) from the Social Sciences and Research Council in Canada to conduct a project: Beyond Harvard: Transplanting Legal Education (2018)
• Awarded $10,000AUD from the American Society for Legal History to create a comparative legal history network (2018)

Books & edited collections

• Susan Bartie and David Sandomierski (eds), American Legal Education Abroad: Critical Histories (NYU Press, 2021)
• Susan Bartie, Free Hands and Minds – Pioneering Australian Legal Scholars (Hart Publishing, 2019) (140,000 words, monograph)

Refereed journal articles

• Susan Bartie, ‘Taking the Discipline Seriously: Twining, Arthurs and Histories of Academic Lawyers’ (2020) Law and History Review 369
• Susan Bartie, ‘Studying Women Legal Scholars: The Challenges of Life History’ (2018) 25 International Journal of the Legal Profession 279
• Susan Bartie, ‘Is Mazur the New Langdell? The Strange Trajectory of Interactive Teaching within the Discipline of Law’ (2017) 37 Legal Studies 520
• Susan Bartie, ‘Histories of Legal Scholars — The Power of Possibility’ (2014) 34 Legal Studies 305
• Susan Bartie, ‘Towards a History of Law as an Academic Discipline’ (2014) 38 Melbourne University Law Review 444

Book chapters

• Susan Bartie, ‘Alice Erh-Soon Tay and the Character of Legal Knowledge in Australia’ in Ulrike Schultz et al (eds), Gender and Careers in the Legal Academy (Hart Publishing, 2021)
• Susan Bartie, ‘Introduction’ in Susan Bartie and David Sandomierski (eds), American Legal Education Abroad: Critical Histories (NYU Press, 2021)
• Susan Bartie, ‘Functionalism, Legal Process and the Transformation (and Subordination) of Australian Law Schools’ in Susan Bartie and David Sandomierski (eds), American Legal Education Abroad: Critical Histories (NYU Press, 2021)

Conference papers & presentations

• 'A Socio-Historical Study of Environmental Lawyers,' Europoean Society for Environmental History Conference (2022)
• 'The First Environmental Law Teachers,' International Working Group of the Legal Profession (2022)
• 'Legal Life History and the Creation of Legal Fields,' Annual Forbes lecture in the Supreme Court of New South Wales (2022)
• 'Criminal Law Scholarship in Australia: Past, Present and Future,’ (panel discussion) The Institute of Criminology, Sydney (2021)
• 'Law's People' Julius Stone Institute for Jurisprudence public seminar series, University of Sydney (2021);

Case notes & book reviews

• Review of 'Law's Documents: Authority, Materiality, Aesthetics' by Katherine Biber, Priya Vaughan and Trish Luker (eds) (2023) Canadian Journal of Law and Society (forthcoming)
• Review of ‘The Teaching of Criminal Law: The Pedagogical Imperatives’ by Kris Gledhill and Ben Livings (eds), Routledge (2017) 29 (1) Current Issues in Criminal Justice 103
• Review of The Campaign Against the Courts: A History of the Judicial Activism Debate’ by Tanya Josev, Federation Press (2017) 3 University of New South Wales Law Journal Forum