Dr Amanda Whiting

Dr Amanda Whiting joined the Faculty of Law at The University of Melbourne as a Lecturer in 2004. She been a member of the Asian Law Centre since 1999. She has taught in the LLB courses Land, Race and Law in Southeast Asia, Law and Society in Southeast Asia, Law and Civil Society in Asia, History and Philosophy of Law, Property and Principles of Public Law; and in the Graduate subjects Islamic Law and Politics in Asia. and Citizens, Groups and States in Asia. Her research is in the area of human rights institutions and practices in the Asia-Pacific Region, gender and religion, and Malaysian legal history. She is Associate Director (Malaysia) of the Asian Law Centre.

Amanda completed her honours degree in Arts at the University of Melbourne in 1981 and then taught seventeenth and eighteenth century history at the University's History Department over the next decade. She also has a Diploma of Education (1988) and a Graduate Diploma of Indonesian (1995) which was partly undertaken at Universitas Kristen Satya Wacana, Indonesia. She completed her LL.B. with First Class Honours in 2001. In 2007 she completed her doctorate - a feminist analysis of mid-seventeenth century English legal and political history. In 2004 her article "'Some Women can Shift it Well Enough': A Legal Context for Understanding the Women Petitioners of the Seventeenth-Century English Revolution" appeared in 21 Australian Feminist Law Journal 77.

Amanda is the author of 'Situating Suhakam: Human Rights Debates and Malaysia's National Human Rights Commission' (2003) 39 (1) Stanford Journal of International Law 59, and 'In the Shadow of Developmentalism: The Human Rigths Commission of Malaysia at the Intersection of State and Civil Society Priorities in C Raj Kumar and DK Srivastava (ed) Human Rights and Development: Law, Policy and Governance (Hong Kong: LexisNexis Butterworths, 2006), both of which provide a contextualised reading of the meanings that human rights have in Malaysia and for Malaysians.

With Andrew Kenyon and Tim Lindsey (of this Faculty) and Tim Marjoribanks (Faculty of Arts) she is engaged in an ARC-funded Discovery Project, 'The Media and ASEAN Transitions: Defamation Law, Journalism and Public Debate in Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore'.

With Dr Carolyn Evans of this Faculty she is the editor of Mixed Blessings: Laws, Religions and Women's Rights in the Asia Pacific Region (Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff, 2006), a book about women's experiences of the dual regimes of law and religion in the Asia-Pacific region.

Amanda is currently writing about the colliding and conflicting understandings of secular and religious law in Malaysia (particularly as they affect women and children); and she is preparing to write a history of the legal profession in Malaysia, focussing on its role as an agent of civil society.

Amanda has been involved with the Australian Journal of Asian Law since its inaugural issue in 1999 and has been an editor since 2002. With Associate Professor Tim Lindsey, Director of the Asian Law Centre, she edited and contributed to Doing Business in Indonesia (Singapore, CCH: 2000).

Associate Professor Michael Feener

Professor M.B. Hooker

Professor M.B. Hooker was appointed as an Associate of the Centre in 1997. He is Adjunct Professor of the Faculty of Law at Australian National University and was previously Professor of Comparative Law at the University of Kent at Canterbury. He is regarded as a world authority on Islamic law and traditional customary law in Southeast Asia and is a Founder and Co-editor of the Australian Journal of Asian Law. Indonesian Syariah: Defining a National Islamic Law will be published by ISEAS, Singapore in 2008. 

Professor Virginia Hooker

Professor Clive Kessler

Professor Clive S. Kessler (BA Syd, PhD London, FASSA) is Emeritus Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of New South Wales. His main scholarly interest is in the culture, society, religion, and politics of the Malay world, especially Malaysia. His is the author of Islam and Politics in a Malay State: Kelantan 1838-1969 (Cornell U.P., 1978) and other significant works on Malaysian society and Malay political culture. He also pursues research into the social, historical and civilizational relations between the faith communities of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. His more general work centres on the question of modernity and its varying cultural forms and diverse civilizational expressions. He maintains close relations with a number of Malaysian universities. He is a frequent commentator in the Australian and international media on political developments in Malaysia, including their legal dimension, notably the changing articulation of the common law and shariah law traditions and the tensions between the judicial institutions and processes grounded in them.

Ms Patricia Prentice

Dr Arskal Salim

Dr Arskal Salim is currently Assistant Professor at the Aga Khan University (AKU) Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations (ISMC) London, United Kingdom. He received his PhD in Law from Melbourne Law School, University of Melbourne, Australia. His undergraduate degree on Islamic law was from Syarif Hidayatullah State Islamic University (UIN) Jakarta, Indonesia. Before joining AKU-ISMC in October 2009, he was a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Germany, for almost three years, where he spent ten months in Aceh undertaking fieldwork on religion and legal pluralism in the post tsunami Aceh. Based on this fieldwork, he is now preparing a monograph with the working title: "Law as Contested Field: Religion, Custom and the State in Aceh". His publications include Challenging the Secular State: The Islamization of Laws in Modern Indonesia, Honolulu: Hawaii University Press, 2008; The Shift in the Zakat Practice in Indonesia: From Piety to an Islamic Socio-Political-Economic System. Thailand: Silkwormbooks, 2008; and Shari'a and Politics in Modern Indonesia, Singapore: ISEAS, 2003.

Dr Kerstin Steiner

Dr Kerstin Steiner is a lecturer at the Department of Business Law and Taxation, Monash University and was appointed as an Associate of the Centre in 2009 after having been a Research Fellow at the Centre since its inauguration. A law graduate from The University of Bielefeld, Kerstin completed her Master of Laws and Doctorial Thesis focusing on Southeast Asian legal studies and international law at The University of Melbourne. Kerstin's research interests include the study of Southeast Asian legal systems particularly Islamic law in Southeast Asia, comparative law and international law. She is currently completing two manuscripts jointly authored with Professor Tim Lindsey on 'Islam, Law and the State in Singapore' and 'Islam, Law and the State in Malaysia and Brunei'. The books will be published by IB Tauris in 2010. In 2009, she was a visiting lecturer at the Department of Syariah and Law, Academy of Islamic Studies, University of Malaya. She has presented her research at conferences and seminars nationally and internationally and published her work in English and German.

Associate Professor Andrew White

Andrew White is an Associate Professor in the School of Law, Singapore Management University. An experienced lawyer with nearly three decades at the Bar, Prof White teaches Islamic Law, Banking, and Commerce in SMU, a course on Islamic Commercial Law (fiqh al-mu‘amalah), and he is developing several professional training programs in Islamic law and finance. He also holds an appointment as a Senior Fellow in the Melbourne Law School. Prof White is a regular speaker regarding Islamic law and finance at academic and professional seminars and conferences throughout the Region, and a frequent commentator on Channel NewsAsia (with a broadcast footprint extending across South East Asia, North East Asia, South Asia, the Middle East, and Australia) and in other Regional media, including Islamic Finance Asia magazine. He acts as a referee for peer-reviewed and other academic publications, and he is also under contract with LexisNexis for publication of a book on Islamic law and finance in the context of Asia. Prof White's current research focus is on Islamic financial dispute resolution (concepts of sulh, including tahkim and wasaatah), combining his professional experience in conventional ADR with his significant scholarship and teaching in Islamic commercial law. Activities in that regard include review and consultation comments by Prof White to the Sindh High Court in Karachi with respect to a proposed mediation bill, consultation by Prof White to Bank Negara Malaysia (State Bank of Malaysia) with respect to a proposed financial ombudsman framework, and other on-going mediation and ADR consulting activities, internationally. Prof White also has acted as a consultant to the American government (US Department of State and USAID) in areas of commercial law reform, including Shari‘ah (fiqh al-mu‘amalah) and other areas of commercial law in Afghanistan and Pakistan.