Recovering pure economic loss in tort after Mallonland
Lunchtime Series 21 February, 2025
Professor Emeritus Barbara McDonald, University of Sydney
Dixson Room, Mitchell Wing, NSW State Library
01:00PM to 02:00PM
Barbara McDonald is a Professor at the University of Sydney Law School and a Fellow at the Australian Academy of Law. She teaches in Torts, Equity, Torts and Contracts II in the undergraduate programme, and Advanced Obligations and Remedies in the postgraduate programme. She is currently the Director of the Sydney Law School in Europe programme which conducts courses in Berlin and Cambridge, and elsewhere, and has been the Director of the JD programme. Barbara recently served as a Commissioner of the Australian Law Reform Commission in Sydney where she headed the Inquiry into Serious Invasions of Privacy in the Digital Era. The Inquiry was completed in June 2014 and the Final Report tabled in Federal Parliament on 3rd September 2014.
Barbara is also Visiting Professor in Law to the New College of the Humanities in London. Barbara has been a consultant to Herbert Smith Freehills since 2000. She is also Consultant Editor to the CCH Torts Reporter.
She is a graduate of the University of Sydney in Arts and Law. After several years in the litigation department of a large Sydney commercial law firm, with a break to complete a Master of Laws at University College London in 1979-1980, she joined the Sydney Law School as a part-time lecturer in 1982. She took up a full-time position in the Sydney Law School in 1991. She was a Visiting Professor at University of Texas at Austin in 2000, teaching US Tort law. She was Pro Dean of the Sydney Law School from 2002-2004.
She was the academic member of the Law Society of New South Wales Specialist Accreditation Board Personal Injuries Law Advisory Committee for many years.
Barbara is the co-editor of a casebook on the law of torts, and a member of the editorial board of the Torts Law Journal. She recently contributed three chapters to the new edition of Fleming’s Law of Torts, and a chapter on privacy law in Torts in Commercial Law. She is a co-author of Celebrity and the Law, published in 2010, with primary authorship of the chapters on defamation and privacy. She is also a contributing author to a textbook on the principles of equity. She has written a number of articles on the impact of tort reform, published in the Journal of Contract Law, the Sydney Law Review, the Australian Bar Review, the Torts Law Journal, and the Commercial Law Quarterly, and in international journals, on the developing law of privacy. In 2006 she addressed the South Wales Supreme Court Annual Conference on the impact of legislative tort reform. Barbara is also commercial law co-editor of the monograph series of the Ross Parsons Centre of Commercial, Corporate and Taxation Law within the Sydney Law School.