Professor Michael Coper succeeded Leslie Zines in 1995 as Professor of Constitutional Law at the ANU. Michael was a founding member of the UNSW Law Faculty in the 1970s, a member of the Inter-State Commission in the 1980s, and had a stint in private practice in the early 1990s. He served in all these capacities as one of Australia’s leading constitutional lawyers, and maintained his interest in the area notwithstanding his long tenure as Dean of the ANU College of Law from 1998-2012.

Professor Coper came to prominence with his prize-winning 1983 book Freedom of Interstate Trade under the Australian Constitution, which was influential in the High Court’s change of direction five years later in the landmark case of Cole v Whitfield, in which Professor Coper also appeared as counsel. His 1987 book Encounters with the Australian Constitution was received to great acclaim, as was the project he conceived and co-edited to fruition in 2001, the comprehensive Oxford Companion to the High Court of Australia.

In addition to his core interest in constitutional law and the judicial process, Professor Coper’s current research extends to legal biography, oral history, and law, philosophy and the photographic image. With colleagues he has conducted interviews of former judges and others to create an oral history of the High Court, and has also written extensively about legal education.