Lisa Toohey

Professor of Law, University of Newcastle
Professor Lisa Toohey is the Assistant Dean (Equity, Diversity and Inclusion) for the Faculty of Business and Law, and the Director of Research for Newcastle Law School. She is a Senior Member of Universities Australia Executive Women Group and an Adjunct Professor at the Faculty of Law at the University of New South Wales.

Professor Toohey teaches and researches in the fields of international trade law, legal design, and dispute resolution. Her research is focussed on the question of how individuals and groups understand and interpret their rights in order to resolve disputes at international, domestic, and transactional levels. This includes a focus on how states in the Asia-Pacific region engage with the international trade system and resolve disputes, how mediation can be better used to address multi-issue public international law disputes, how individuals in civil disputes access and interpret legal information, and how legal design can be used as a tool to better facilitate understanding of legal information.

Prior to academia, Lisa practised commercial law in Australia at Corrs Chambers Westgarth and in Vietnam at Baker & McKenzie, where her practice included WTO law, dispute resolution, and intellectual property and telecommunications. She has worked across East, Southeast, and Central Asia on dispute resolution and WTO projects funded by the Australian, US and Canadian governments and with international donors such as the Asian Development Bank.

These projects have developed trade law and dispute resolution capacity within the region, including in Vietnam, Azerbaijan and Myanmar, and through work in Australia with visiting delegations from Thailand, China, and Iraq. She has taught as a visiting professor at the Centre Franco-Vietnamien de Formation à la Gestion at the National Economics University of Vietnam, at Naresuan University Thailand, at the University of Lausanne, and at the National Taipei University of Business.

Lisa is a member of the Executive Council of the Society of International Economic Law, has been a Senior Fellow of the Institute of International Economic Law at Georgetown University in Washington DC, is an elected member of the Asian WTO Research Network, a founding member of the UNSW China International Business and Economic Law (CIBEL) Centre, and a founder and past President of the Australasian Dispute Resolution Network.