Rate My Professor John Anderson

Anderson's research interests focus on inequities and unfairness in the criminal justice system, particularly sentencing and treating like cases alike, integration of restorative justice practices, the legal framework for arson including mental elements and sentencing, evidence law aspects such as identification evidence, tendency and context evidence, judicial discretion to exclude evidence, and issue warnings, as well as legal practice and health issues through an ARC Discovery Project on advance personal planning and elder abuse. Prominent publications include textbooks like Uniform Evidence Law: Text and Essential Cases (2021), Criminal Law Perspectives: From Principles to Practice (2021, with Murphy B, Livings B, et al.), Uniform Evidence in Australia, 3rd Edition (2020, with Weinstein R, Marychurch J, Roy J); book chapters such as "Life Imprisonment in Australia: Restoring a Hope of Release and the Phuong Ngo Case" (2023); and journal articles including "Sentencing and placement of offenders with dementia: a significant contemporary challenge for the criminal justice system" (2026, with Baird A), "A study of the values and principles-based approach to restorative justice" (2025, with Islam MS, Li B), "Recidivism of paroled murderers as a factor in the utility of life imprisonment" (2019), "Playing with Fire: Contemporary Fault Issues in the Enigmatic Crime of Arson" (2016), and "The Label of Life Imprisonment in Australia: A Principled or Populist Approach to an Ultimate Sentence" (2012). He contributed to the Life Imprisonment Worldwide project as a 2012 ARC peer reviewer, 2017 visiting scholar at the University of Nottingham, co-author of UN policy briefings, and chapter contributor to Harvard's 2019 Life Imprisonment: a Global Human Rights Analysis. Anderson has earned ten teaching awards and citations, including the 2010 Australian Learning & Teaching Council's Teaching Excellence Award for Law, Economics, Business and Related Studies.