Dr Trish Luker joined UTS in 2012 as a Chancellor's Postdoctoral Research Fellow. This competitive fellowship is awarded to outstanding early career researchers who wish to develop their research skills to become the next generation of leading academics at UTS. In 2016, Trish was appointed an ongoing academic in UTS Faculty of Law.

Trish is a legal scholar, with expertise in socio-legal, feminist and critical theory. Her innovative, interdisciplinary research is concerned with how, and on what basis, legal decisions are made. It focuses on two areas: analysis of legal decision-making and court processes; and evidentiary assessment, including theories of the documentary form in law. Her work engages with cross-disciplinary methods and sources, examining the impacts of legal practices upon women, Indigenous peoples, refugees, and others whose experiences are erased or overlooked by dominant legal doctrines and processes.

Trish has led multiple innovative, internationally-significant, externally-funded research projects that have spearheaded scholarly movements and shaped policy and practice in scholarship, legal, court and judicial practice. She is a leader of the Australian Feminist Judgments Project (ARC DP120102375), which investigates the possibility of feminist approaches to legal decision-making. In the Court as Archive project (ARC DP130101954), she has made important contributions to understanding the archival responsibilities of courts. Her most recent project (with Katherine Biber), is called What is a Document? Evidentiary Challenges in the Digital Age (ARC DP160100414), investigates the challenges to evidence law brought about by the shift to the digital age.

Trish's innovative research directly informs and enhances her teaching, enabling law students to develop as critical and progressive thinkers. She has taken a leading role in the introduction of research-inspired and integrated curriculum development across compulsory and elective subjects, particularly drawing on my expertise in feminist legal theory and the emerging field of law and language. She teaches the core law subject, Evidence (70109), and two JD legal theory elective subjects, Feminist Perspectives on Law and Justice (78239) and Reading the Law: Language, Power and Ideology (78241).

Trish performs several leadership roles that reflect her areas of research expertise. Within UTS Law, she was an inaugural Convenor of the Feminist Legal Research Group. Trish plays an important leadership role within the scholarly community. She is the past President of the Law and Society Association of Australia and New Zealand: https://www.lsaanz.org/. In 2020, she took on the role as a Managing Editor of the new international journal: Legalities: The Australian and New Zealand Journal of Law and Society: https://www.euppublishing.com/loi/legal.

Previously, Trish has worked as an author, editor and communications professional at the Victorian Law Reform Commission, the Federal Court of Australia, the State Library of New South Wales and the Tenants Union of Victoria.