The Australian Centre for Health Law Research (ACHLR) regularly welcomes colleagues from elsewhere in Australia and around the world. These visits are of rich mutual benefit, facilitating knowledge exchange, building international collaborations, and exposing everyone to different ways of thinking and working.
Recent international visitors include:
Adjunct Professor Luc Deliens – Professor of Palliative Care Research & Founding Director of the End of Life Care
Research Group, VRIJE Universiteit Brussel
Professor Deliens is focused on timely integration of palliative care, interprofessional models of palliative care, public health and palliative care and medical assistance in dying.
Hi is the President of Public Health Palliative Care International, co-chair of the European Association for Palliative Care (EAPC) Reference Group on Public Health and Palliative Care, and is involved in different on-going EU funded research projects. He successfully supervised over 60 PhDs and published over 600 papers and over 50 book chapters and received several scientific awards for his scientific work. Luc Deliens is member of the Royal Academy of Medicine of Belgium.
Professor Emma Cave – Professor of Healthcare Law, Durham University
Professor Cave publishes widely in the field of Health Law, which she teaches at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. Her research focuses on understanding and shaping the ambits of patient choice and emerging biotechnologies. The seventh edition of her co-authored book (with Professors Margaret Brazier and Rob Heywood) Medicine, Patients and the Law was published in 2023 and her 2004 monograph The Mother of All Crimes on criminalisation of the child born alive was reissued in 2018.
Bridging science and its clinical application, Professor Cave works at the intersection of research and policy to drive meaningful change.
Professor Cave delivered the 10th ACHLR Annual Public Oration in 2022. You can listen to a recording of the oration (The sufficiency of young adults’ autonomy) on the ACHLR website.
Dr Yukio Sakurai – Doctor of Laws (Yokohama National University, Japan, 2022)
Dr Sakurai is a member of the European Law Institute. His life’s work focuses on research in health law, elder law, and adult support and protection law across East Asia, Europe, and Australia, as well as global governance studies.
Professor Emily Jackson – Professor of Law, LSW Law School
Emily’s research interests are in the field of medical law. She has served as a member of the British Medical Association Medical Ethics Committee (2005-2022), Deputy Chair of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (2008-2012) and a Judicial Appointments Commissioner (2014-2017). She is a Fellow of the British Academy, and in 2017 was awarded an OBE for services to higher education.
Professor Cave delivered the 11th ACHLR Annual Public Oration in 2023. You can listen to a recording of the oration (Regulating Reproduction) on the ACHLR website.
Professor Kumaralingam Amirthalingam – Professor, National University of Singapore
Professor Amirthalingam joined the Faculty of Law, National University of Singapore in 2000 and over the years has served as Vice Dean (Academic Affairs), Vice Dean (International Programmes) and Director, Asian Law Institute. At the University level, he has served on various committees and was Chair of the NUS Teaching Academy from 2015 to 2018. He spent two years on secondment to the Attorney-General’s Chambers, Singapore as a Deputy Public Prosecutor and Senior Director (Research & Policy), appearing before the State Court and the High Court. He has twice appeared before the Court of Appeal as an Amicus Curiae. He has advised the Ministry of Law and Ministry of Health, and is a member of the Singapore Medical Council’s Complaints Panel.
His research is primarily in the areas of criminal law and justice (focusing on the role of the Public Prosecutor) and tort law (focusing on medical liability and economic loss).
Professor John Coggon – Chair in Law, University of Bristol Law School
John Coggon is Professor of Law in the Centre for Health, Law, and Society at the University of Bristol Law School in the United Kingdom. Beyond the University, he is an Honorary Member of the UK Faculty of Public Health (FPH), sits on the ethics committees of the FPH and the British Medical Journal, and is a member of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics.
John’s research focuses especially on philosophical and socio-legal questions in public and global health ethics and law and mental capacity law, examined in particular through methods of moral and political analysis. His academic works include the books What Makes Health Public? (Cambridge University Press, 2012) and, with Keith Syrett and A.M. Viens, Public Health Law: Ethics, Governance, and Regulation (Routledge, 2017). With A.M. Viens, John was commissioned by the UK Department of Health to write Public Health Ethics in Practice (2017), and he has contributed through FPH in the production of academic and public and practitioner-focused resources on public health ethics and law. He has been on many funded research projects, including (until summer 2022) the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI)-funded UK Pandemic Ethics Accelerator and the UK Prevention Research Partnership-funded Tackling the Root Causes Upstream of Unhealthy Urban Development. He was also a co-I on the UKRI-funded project Judging Values and Participation in Mental Capacity Law.
Professor Coggon delivered the 12th ACHLR Annual Public Oration in 2024. You can listen to a recording of the oration (Is Mental Capacity Law Law?) on the ACHLR website.
Adjunct Professor Bridget Crawford – Professor of Law, Elisabeth Haub School of Law Pace University
University Distinguished Professor Bridget J. Crawford joined the faculty of the Elisabeth Haub School of Law at Pace University in 2003. She teaches courses in Federal Income Taxation; Estate and Gift Taxation; and Wills, Trusts and Estates. Prior to joining the faculty, Professor Crawford practiced at Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy LLP (now Milbank LLP). From 2008 to 2012, and again in 2014 to 2015, she served as Pace Haub Law’s Associate Dean for Research and Faculty Development.
In 2021, Professor Crawford received the title of University Distinguished Professor—the highest honour the University bestows on a member of the faculty.
Professor Crawford currently serves as the President of the American Tax Policy Institute. She is a Fellow of the American College of Trust and Estate Counsel (ACTEC), a Fellow of the American College of Tax Counsel (ACTC), and a member of the American Law Institute. She formerly served as Editor of the ACTEC Law Journal and as the chair of the AALS Section on Women in Legal Education and the Section on Trusts and Estates.
Professor Crawford was one of 26 law professors profiled in What the Best Law Teachers Do (Harvard University Press 2013), a study of exemplary legal educators nationwide.
Adjunct Dr Jessica Young – Senior Research Fellow, School of Health, Victoria University of Wellington Te Herenga Waka
Dr Young is a qualitative researcher with expertise in the sociology of health, illness, death and medicine with a theoretical grounding to examine how powers converge to shape people’s dying experiences with interest in the individual meanings people ascribe to socio-cultural values.
Her primary research area is assisted dying. She has made a substantial contribution to the growing field of assisted dying research in New Zealand using a variety of methods. Her thesis investigated the reasons people approaching the end of life consider assisted dying. It was the first study of the wish to hasten death in NZ. Her research drew on discursive and assemblage methodological approaches to illuminate the dynamism, the contextual and relational elements of the wish to hasten death, overlooked by much of the literature.
With a prestigious fellowship from the Cancer Society to conduct further studies on end-of-life care, she explored the experiences of people with life-limiting cancer who have declined hospice services and am also researching the experiences of people going through the assisted dying process and those who support them under the End of Life Choice Act.
She is leading several projects on assisted dying including the first national study ‘Exploring the early experiences of the assisted dying service in Aotearoa New Zealand’, with $1.4m funding from the New Zealand Health Research Council. Jessica established and co-chairs the Assisted Dying Research Network and was a founding member of the statutory body Support and Consultation for End of Life NZ (SCENZ) Group.
Adjunct Professor Margaret Hall – Professor and Director, MA in Applied Legal Studies Program – School of Criminology, Simon Fraser University
Margaret Isabel Hall LLB, LLM, PhD is the Society of Notaries Public of BC Chair in Applied Legal Studies, the Director of the MA in Applied Legal Studies Program, and a Professor in the School of Criminology. Prior to joining SFU, Margaret was an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Law at Thompson Rivers University, where she was a founding faculty member. Margaret’s research incorporates both empirical legal methodologies and “black letter” doctrinal analysis. Her areas of research and publication include health law (including medical assistance in dying), mental capacity and legal theories of state of mind, vulnerability theory, wills, and tort law (Margaret is a co-author of Canadian Tort Law and The Law of Nuisance in Canada).
Margaret is also an Adjunct Professor at the Thompson Rivers University Faculty of Law.