Distinguished ProfessorShaunnagh Dorsett

Distinguished Professor Shaunnagh Dorsett's research focuses on questions of authority, reaching across legal history, jurisprudence and contemporary indigenous rights to land. Her work is interdisciplinary, drawing on legal doctrine, legal history and history of political thought in order to shed light on some of the key concepts of law: authority; jurisdiction; and sovereignty. Her work has been influential in a number of areas of legal scholarship, including jurisprudence, international law and legal history.

Professor Dorsett has made a significant contribution to furthering the discipline of legal history, through the organisation of key international conferences, membership of editorial committees and editorial boards, and administrative positions with academic societies. She is an Honorary Fellow of the American Society for Legal History; a member of the Advisory Board of the European Society for Comparative Legal History; a co-founder of the Legal Histories of Empires conference series; and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Law.

She is also the editor of a number of influential legal history collections, including Law and Politics in British Colonial Thought: Transpositions of Empire (Palgrave McMillen) (edited with Ian Hunter); Legal Histories of the British Empire: Laws, Engagements and Legacies (Routledge) (edited with John McLaren); and Legal Histories of Empire: Navigating Legalities (Routledge) (edited with Lyndsay Campbell).

Her current research project, funded by the Australian Research Council, examines curial reform in the British Empire in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars.