Matthew Harding

Professor Matthew Harding is a Professor and Professorial Fellow at Melbourne Law School, University of Melbourne. He graduated from the University of Melbourne in 1998 with first class honours degrees in law and arts. He holds a Bachelor of Civil Law degree with distinction and a DPhil from the University of Oxford, with his doctoral thesis examining the moral foundations of fiduciary law. During postgraduate studies at Oxford, Harding received Chevening and Clarendon Fund Scholarships and held a research fellowship funded by the Andrew Mellon Foundation during 2002–2003. Prior to joining academia, he worked as a solicitor for Arthur Robinson & Hedderwicks (now Allens) in Melbourne. Harding joined Melbourne Law School as a lecturer in 2005, later serving as Deputy Dean and Head of Department from 2016 to 2020, Director of the Melbourne Law School Obligations Group for several years, and inaugural Director of the University’s Researcher Development Unit from 2021 to 2022. He has been a visiting scholar at the University of Toronto, Queen’s University Belfast, the University of Otago, and the University of the Western Cape, and in 2020 was the Kwa Geok Choo Distinguished Visitor at the National University of Singapore.

Matthew Harding is an internationally recognised expert on the theoretical underpinnings of private law and the law of charities and other not-for-profit organisations. His research interests include the theory and doctrines of equity, especially fiduciary law, charity and not-for-profit law and regulation, law of property, judicial practice and precedent, and the philosophy of trust and trustworthiness. He authored Charity Law and the Liberal State (Cambridge University Press, 2014) and edited Exploring Private Law (Cambridge University Press, 2010), Not-for-Profit Law: Theoretical and Comparative Perspectives (Cambridge University Press, 2014), The Research Handbook of Not-for-Profit Law (Edward Elgar, 2018), Fiduciaries and Trust: Ethics, Politics, Economics and Law (Cambridge University Press, 2020), Trusts Law in the Asia-Pacific: Theory and Practice in Context (Hart Publishing, 2021), and Charity Law: Exploring the Concept of Public Benefit (Routledge, 2022). His articles have been published in the Law Quarterly Review, Modern Law Review, and Oxford Journal of Legal Studies. Harding teaches subjects in private law, legal theory, and charity law and has supervised PhD students. He is Editor of the Journal of Equity and serves on the editorial boards of Oxford Studies in Private Law Theory and the Third Sector Review. He chairs the Charity Law Association of Australia and New Zealand, is a member of the Charities Committee of the Law Council of Australia, and sits on the Advisory Board for the Judicial College of Victoria’s Scholarship for the Legal Community online platform.

Professional Email: m.harding@unimelb.edu.au