Formal Qualifications: B Sc (Syd), LL B (UNSW), LL M (Syd) - a degree about every 15 years, so I wonder what I'll do in about 2006?

Interests and Experience: As a boy I remember finding the history of the development of democracy (the American and French Revolutions, the three Reform Acts and the House of Lords crisis in the UK, the development of self-government and Federation in Australia) the most exciting parts of history. I was fascinated by the way that campaigns for more democracy were always opposed on the grounds that it would be the End of the Western World as We Know It, but the English-speaking parts of the western world, at least, went from strength to strength. (And there were probably local reasons why the French Revolution did turn nasty in the short and medium term, giving a great feeling of justification to the opponents of democracy.)

After school I did a degree in Physics and worked for a couple of years at the Weapons Research Establishment outside Adelaide, building instrument packages that got shot into the upper atmosphere in rockets - which is why one of my friends calls me "the rocket scientist"! I then worked for 11 years (a solar cycle) at the Ionospheric Prediction Service, studying and forecasting the effect of solar flares on the ionosphere.

But I was still interested in politics and Constitutions, so I then studied law, practiced it briefly, and have been teaching it (at UNSW, Macquarie, and QUT) for 17 years. I'm interested in the way that law intersects with ethics and politics - so my two main interests within law are the process of common-law reasoning (see the excellent (!) book by Al MacAdam and myself, Judicial Reasoning and the Doctrine of Precedent in Australia, Butterworths Australia, 1998), and Constitutional Law.

I have been teaching Constitutional Law since 1989. No major publications in that field, but I have done a number of lengthy submissions to bodies like the Electoral and Administrative Review Commission (EARC), Queensland Parliament's Legal, Constitutional and Administrative Review Committee (LCARC - see, in particular, their Final Report on Consolidation of the Queensland Constitution) and the Queensland Constitutional Review Commission, which (I think I can say - blush, blush) have been received with some respect. In 1997 I ran for election to the Constitutional Convention under the slogan "A Real Republic Guarantees Democratic Rights". My campaigning consisted of the slogan and a website (which is still there on Ross Garrad's server), so I suppose I did pretty well to get 2037 votes - but it wasn't nearly enough to get elected!

I have been a member of the Proportional Representation Society for years, and have held office within the Queensland branch a couple of times. I was on the committee of the Queensland Chapter of the Constitutional Centenary Foundation for about four years, and was secretary for one year.

As I teach Constitutional Law to Uni Law students, many of whom know nothing about the political system and care less, I often think I would fulfil a more useful role by teaching about the political and constitutional system to younger students, and to older members of the public who are actually interested in learning about those topics. This web site is an attempt to start doing that.

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