Katy Barnett is a Professor at Melbourne Law School, University of Melbourne, and a distinguished Australian legal scholar, educator and author. She specialises in private law, with particular expertise in remedies, contracts, equity, torts, trusts, property, animal law, comparative law and legal history. She is the author of numerous books, journal articles and other publications, including several remedies texts dealing with Australian and English law. Her work has been cited by apex and superior courts including the High Court of Australia and the Supreme Court of Canada. Her book with Professor Jeremy Gans, Guilty Pigs: the weird and wonderful history of animal law, has been translated into Simplified Chinese.
She holds a PhD from the University of Melbourne, with her thesis later published as a monograph, Accounting for Profit for Breach of Contract: Theory and Practice (2012, Hart). She has taught a broad range of private law subjects, including Remedies, Trusts, Equity, Property, Torts and Contract. In 2016 she was the recipient of the Barbara Falk award for excellence in teaching, for her redesign of the remedies course. In 2013, she was a visiting scholar at Brasenose College, Oxford, as part of the Melbourne-Oxford Faculty Exchange. She is currently an editor at the Australian Law Journal, and was an editor at the Indian Law Review. In 2021, she was elected to the Editorial Advisory Board of Melbourne University Press as the Law member.
Katy is passionate about academic freedom and civil disagreement, and allowing viewpoint diversity. She is a member of Heterodox Academy. One of her goals is to make academic writing more accessible to the public. She was a foundation editor of the Melbourne Law School blog, Opinions on High, with Professor Jeremy Gans and Dr Brad Jessup from 2013 to 2021.
Prior to becoming an academic, Katy was a Researcher at the Victorian Court of Appeal, an Associate to the Honourable Justice Mandie at the Supreme Court of Victoria, and a commercial litigator at Freehills and Russell Kennedy. Along with a Bachelor of Laws degree with Honours, she also completed a Bachelor of Arts with majors in English Literature, History and Medieval Studies.
Katy is an accomplished public speaker, and has presented her research to a diverse set of audiences. Her research covers a very wide range of topics, including cryptocurrency, the Indian law of contract damages, offshore trusts in the South Pacific, and medieval French cases involving prosecutions of animals.
In her free time, Katy spends time with her family, and enjoys art and calligraphy, as well as writing fiction and media commentary on a variety of issues. In 2020, her autobiographical piece, ‘I don’t dance like the other cats’ (describing how she has overcome lifelong difficulties with walking associated with cerebral palsy) received an award for the most read story on Right Now. She has a personal substack called “What Katy Did”.
Languages other than English:
Intermediate Japanese
Elementary French (able to read many documents, even in Norman or 17th century French, slow at speaking)