Olivia Barr

• Associate Professor of Law, Melbourne Law School, The University of Melbourne

Dr. Olivia Barr is an Associate Professor at Melbourne Law School where she is the Director of a research programme on 'Geography, place and the possibilities of law' at the Institute for International Law and the Humanities (IILAH). She is a non-Indigenous lawyer-turned-academic, who grew up on Whadjuk Noongar Boodja and now lives on Wurundjeri Country. She has previously worked as a public lawyer in the role of government solicitor, in law reform and for the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, and studied at UWA, UBC (Canada) and Melbourne. Olivia researches in the interdisciplinary field of law and humanities, with expertise on the many relationships between law, place and sovereignties.

Olivia has three main research areas. She has a long-standing interest in the overlooked topic of legal movement and its role in colonisation, including the role of walking, political marches and public ceremonies, as captured in her book, A Jurisprudence of Movement: Common Law, Walking, Unsettling Place (Routledge, 2016). She is interested in mapping out a new field of inquiry on law and place, which links legal theory with several other disciplines, including geography, art, architecture and geology, to offer insights into the localised, grounded and overlapping nature of multiple laws. She also conducts research that applies these theoretical insights to more practical public law settings, including investigating future possibilities for state recognition of First Nations' sovereignty, sovereignties, and self-government.

• –present Associate Professor of Law, Melbourne Law School, The University of Melbourne

MENAFN22042026000199003603ID1111019855