Rate My Professor Peter Rush

Associate Professor Peter Rush joined the Law Faculty at the University of Melbourne in 1999. With a multifaceted career, he has worked as a youth worker, artist, filmmaker, and scholar. Since 1988, he has taught in law faculties and criminology departments across Australia and England. His teaching portfolio includes criminal law, jurisprudence, legal discourse, gender and law, evidence, legal history and legal method, law and the body, and law and criminal justice. In 2004/2005, he held the position of Karl Loewenstein Fellow in Political Science at Amherst College in the United States.

Peter Rush's research interests lie in criminal law—encompassing Australian, comparative, and international dimensions—jurisprudence and the humanities, international criminal justice, and trauma and transitional justice. He is the author of several books on criminal law and has edited collections on jurisprudence and poststructuralist legal theory. A prominent figure in the critical legal studies movement in the United Kingdom, he coordinated its national conference and was a founding member of the interdisciplinary legal theory journal Law & Critique. He serves on the editorial boards of several legal theory journals and participates actively in the Australian Law and Literature Association and the Australian Law and Society Association. Rush contributes to community and professional discussions on law reform, especially concerning the law of sexual offences and the criminal law of HIV transmission. He has delivered invited papers and lectures at institutions such as Amherst College, Carleton University, and New York University. In 2000, he directed a short documentary film exploring justice, aesthetics, and colonialism in Melbourne. Presently, he directs the International Criminal Justice Research programme within the Institute for International Law and the Humanities and serves as Associate Director of Legal Aesthetics at the Centre for Media and Communications Law.