Katy Barnett

Professor Katy Barnett is a Professor of Property Law at Melbourne Law School, University of Melbourne. She completed an LLB with Honours and a BA with majors in English, History, and Medieval Studies at the University of Melbourne in 1999. In 2010, she obtained her PhD from the same university on accounts of profit for breach of contract. Before pursuing postgraduate studies, Barnett served as a Research Assistant to the Court of Appeal at the Supreme Court of Victoria, completed her articles at Freehills, acted as an Associate to Justice Mandie at the Supreme Court of Victoria, and worked as a banking litigator at Russell Kennedy. She joined Melbourne Law School in 2006 as a sessional lecturer and received a permanent appointment in 2010. She continues to connect with legal practice as a legal consultant at Sharpe & Abel and was a visiting scholar at Brasenose College, Oxford in 2013 as part of the Melbourne-Oxford Faculty Exchange. Barnett is committed to diversity in academia as a member of Heterodox Academy and serves on the Melbourne Law School JD Committee.

Barnett's research interests encompass remedies law and related private law topics, including disgorgement of profit, the calculation of damages at common law and in statute, the law on penalties, and proprietary remedies for breach of fiduciary duty. She also explores comparative law, animal law, behavioural economics, and legal history. Her teaching covers Property, Equity and Trusts, Trusts, Torts, Contract, and Remedies in the LLB and JD degrees, as well as Remedies in Commercial Law and Remedies in the Construction Law Context in the Masters program. Key publications include Accounting for Profit for Breach of Contract: Theory and Practice (Hart Publishing, 2012), Remedies in Australian Private Law (with Sirko Harder, Cambridge University Press, 2018; second edition), and Guilty Pigs: Animals, Law and History (with Jeremy Gans, Black Inc., 2022). She received the Barbara Falk Award for excellence in teaching in 2016. Barnett is a foundation editor of the Melbourne Law School blog, Opinions on High (with Professor Jeremy Gans and Dr Brad Jessup), and was elected to the Editorial Advisory Board of Melbourne University Press as the Law member in 2021.

Professional Email: k.barnett@unimelb.edu.au