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Ian Freckelton AO QC

Professorial Fellow in Law, The University of Melbourne

Dr Freckelton is a Queen's Counsel at the Victorian Bar, practising as a barrister throughout Australia. His practice is trial, appellate and advisory, focussing on cases of complexity and with significant amounts of expert evidence. He is also a judge of the Supreme Court of Nauru.

He is also a Professorial Fellow in Law and Psychiatry at the University of Melbourne, where he is a co-director of the postgraduate health law program, an Adjunct Professor of Forensic Medicine at Monash University, an Adjunct Professor at Johns Hopkins University in the United States, and an Adjunct Professor, Australian Centre for Health Law Research, Faculty of Law, Queensland University of Technology. He holds both a Doctor of Laws degree (LLD, Melb) and a PhD (Griff) in Law.

Dr Freckelton is an elected Fellow of the Australian Academy of Law, the Academy of Social Sciences Australia, and the Australasian College of Legal Medicine. In 2015 he was a Commissioner at the Victorian Law Reform Commission (running the reference on Medicinal Cannabis) and is an inaugural member of both the Coronial Council of Victoria and the Australian Advisory Council on the Medicinal Use of Cannabis.

Dr Freckelton has been a member of 10 statutory tribunals, including at present the Mental Health Tribunal of Victoria.

Dr Freckelton is a former President of the Australian and New Zealand Association of Psychiatry, Psychology and Law (ANZAPPL) and was elected a lifetime member of ANZAPPL. He is the Editor of the Journal of Law and Medicine and the Editor-in-Chief of Psychiatry, Psychology and Law. He is the author of more than 40 books and over 600 peer reviewed articles and chapters of books. His most recent books are Scholarly Misconduct (OUP, 2016), which deals with an array of forms of misconduct, including research fraud, plagiarism, sexual misconduct, forensic misconduct, dissipation and intemperate denigration and disputation, and Expert Evidence in Criminal Jury Trials (OUP, 2016) (with Delahunty, Horan and McKimmie), which is an empirical study of expert evidence in 55 Australian criminal jury trials, the 6th edition of Expert Evidence: Law, Practice, Procedure and Regulation (Thomson, 2019), and (with Kerry Petersen) Tensions and Traumas in Health Law (Federation Press, 2018). He is currently completing a book (with Professor David Ranson) on Death Investigation and the Coroner's Inquest.

Professor Freckelton has given lectures at universities throughout Australia and New Zealand and at many tertiary institutions in Europe and in North America.

In 2021 Professor Freckelton was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) for "distinguished service to the law and to the legal profession across fields including health, medicine and technology."

Experience

  • –present
    Professorial Fellow in Law and Psychiatry, University of Melbourne

Education

  • 2017 
    University of Melbourne, LLD
  • 2007 
    QC, Victorian Bar
  • 1997 
    Griffith University, PhD
  • 1981 
    University of Sydney, LLB
  • 1979 
    University of Sydney, BA (Hons)

Honours

AO QC LLD PhD