Academy Fellow

Professor Julie Stubbs is Honorary Professor UNSW Law. She was previously Professor and Co-Director of the Centre for Crime, Law and Justice at the UNSW Law School. She is a criminologist whose interdisciplinary research sits at the intersection of sociology and law.  

She has made a substantial contribution to research concerning legal responses to domestic violence and homicide, and has influenced legal developments concerning defences to homicide. With Professor Julia Tolmie and Professor Elizabeth Sheehy she has undertaken comparative studies of legal responses to battered women charged with homicide in Australia, New Zealand and Canada, which has been cited by the Supreme Court of Canada and the High Court of Australia and other courts.  Her research concerning restorative justice and gendered violence has attracted strong international interest and is widely cited. She also has contributed to the development of violence prevention and policy and practice in response to violence against women through research leadership and advisory roles with VicHealth and ANROWS, and as a Chief Investigator on the National Community Attitudes to Violence against Women Surveys.

Her research team has significantly influenced international debates about the capacity for justice reinvestment to reduce incarceration rates and has contributed new normative and empirical insights into the pre-conditions for justice reinvestment aligned with social justice. The book Justice Reinvestment: Winding Back Imprisonment based on their ARC DP project was drawn on by the ALRC inquiry into Indigenous incarceration and the book and other resources produced by the team have facilitated the development of a national network of justice reinvestment projects in Australia.      

Her current research includes the ARC DP project Rethinking Community Sanctions which is examining the normative bases for community corrections drawing on jurisprudence and criminological theory and undertaking empirical research on historical shifts in policies and practices, and contemporary. The research focuses on groups who are currently very vulnerable within criminal justice – Indigenous people, women, and people with compromised mental or cognitive capacity. This research as the potential to contribute to the development of theory, policy and more equitable justice outcomes and is especially at the present time when imprisonment rates are at record highs but community sanctions that are alternatives to prison do not have a clearly expressed purpose and lack legitimacy.

Co-Director of the Centre for Crime, Law and Justice, Law School UNSW Sydney

Board Member, Law and Justice Foundation NSW

Australian Law Reform Commission, Member, Advisory Committee, Inquiry into the Incarceration Rate of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples, 2017-18

ANROWS - National Survey on Community Attitudes to Violence Against Women, 2017 Co-Chair Implementation Committee, 2016-2019

Victorian Health Promotion Foundation, Preventing Violence Against Women Research Advisory Committee, 2004-2013

NSW Department of Corrective Services, Member, Institutional Ethics Committee, 1999-2010

Director of the Institute of Criminology, Faculty of Law, University of Sydney, 2003

Advisory Panel on Domestic and Family Homicides, NSW, 2009

Criminal Justice Sexual Assault Taskforce, NSW, 2004-05

Panel of International Experts on the Development of Instruments to Implement an International Criminal Justice Strategy to Eliminate Violence Against Women, Rapporteur Criminal Law and Criminal Procedure Working Group, 1998

Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia

Australian and New Zealand Society of Criminology

1. Stubbs J & Baldry E 2017, In pursuit of fundamental change within the Australian penal landscape: Taking inspiration from the Corston Report in L. Moore, P. Scraton & A. Wahidin (eds) Women’s imprisonment and the case for abolition Routledge, London, pp129-149

2. Brown D, Cunneen C, Schwartz, M, Stubbs J and Young C (2016) Justice reinvestment: Winding back imprisonment Palgrave Macmillan.

3. Stubbs J (2016) 'Murder, manslaughter and domestic violence' in K Fitz-Gibbon and S Walklate (eds) Homicide, gender and responsibility Routledge, pp36-52.

4. Stubbs J (2016) ''Searching for Integrity in Domestic Violence Policing'' Hunter J, Roberts P, Young S, Dixon D (eds), Integrity in the Criminal Process : From Theory into Practice Hart UK, pp53-74.

5. Sheehy E, Stubbs, J & Tolmie, J (2014) Securing Fair Outcomes for Battered Women Charged with Homicide: Analysing Defence Lawyering In R v Falls 38(2) Melbourne University Law Review 666-708.