Olivia Barr

Olivia Barr is an Associate Professor at Melbourne Law School, University of Melbourne, and Director of the research programme on ‘Geography, place and the possibilities of law’ at the Institute for International Law and the Humanities. She is a non-Indigenous lawyer-turned-academic who grew up on Whadjuk Noongar Boodja and now lives on Wurundjeri Country. Barr is a graduate of the University of Western Australia and the University of British Columbia and holds a PhD from the University of Melbourne. Prior to her academic career, she served as a government solicitor, worked in law reform, and contributed to the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. She joined Melbourne Law School as a lecturer and has progressed to her current role, where she is recognized as a highly regarded teacher in subjects such as Property Law and Administrative Law.

Barr's research specializes in the interdisciplinary field of law and humanities, with a focus on the relationships between law, place, and sovereignties. Her work examines legal movement and its role in colonisation, including walking, political marches, and public ceremonies. She is developing a new field of inquiry on law and place, linking legal theory to geography, art, architecture, and geology to illuminate the localised, grounded, and overlapping nature of multiple laws. These theoretical insights are applied to practical public law issues, such as possibilities for state recognition of First Nations’ sovereignty and self-government. Barr leads the Legal Footprints research project, exploring relationships between laws and land, languages, and Country, which has produced academic journal articles, an artistic mural, and performances. She also collaborates with Indigenous communities on property and culture issues. Key publications include her monograph A Jurisprudence of Movement: Common Law, Walking, Unsettling Place (Routledge, 2016), 'Legal Footprints' in Law Text Culture (2017), and 'A Jurisprudential Tale of a Road, an Office, and a Triangle: Law, Place and Movement' in Law & Literature (2015). Her scholarship has garnered over 190 citations.

Professional Email: olivia.barr@unimelb.edu.au