Ph.D. – Law – The University of Melbourne – 2001
M.A. – Public Policy Studies – Australian National University – 1994
LL.B. – The University Of Melbourne – 1988
B.A. – Political Science – The University Of Melbourne – 1987
Dr. Penelope (Pip) Nicholson is the Associate Dean (JD) of the Melbourne Law School and the Associate Director (Vietnam) and Director of the Comparative Legal Studies Program at the Asian Law Centre at the University of Melbourne. Her teaching and research are in dispute resolution, comparative legal studies, law and reform in Asia and law and society in Asia. Dr. Nicholson is also qualified to practice law and is a barrister and solicitor of the Supreme Court of Victoria.
Pip’s publications include: Socialism and Legal Change: The Dynamics of Vietnamese and Chinese Reform (co-edited with John Gillespie); Borrowing Court Systems: the Experience of Socialist Vietnam (Martinus Nijhoff, 2007); Examining Practice, Interrogating Theory: Comparative Legal Studies in Asia (Martinus Nijhoff, 2008) (co-edited with Sarah Biddulph); and New Courts in Asia (Routledge), co-edited with Professor Andrew Harding (Routledge, 2009). Pip, together with Camille Cameron, holds an ARC grant to investigate court-oriented legal reform in Cambodia and Vietnam. She also holds an ARC grant with Tim Lindsey to analyse ‘Drugs, Law and Criminal Procedure in Southeast Asia’.
Her current research interests include law and legal change (including court reform) in transitional countries, drug trials in Asia and the cross-cultural legal research and development. Pip has spoken on these issues in the USA, Canada, Japan, Vietnam, France, Thailand, Hong Kong, Sweden, UK and the Netherlands.
Pip is an internationally recognised expert in courts and legal reform (particularly within socialist states). She has consulted widely on these issues.