Rate My Professor Jonathan Harlen

Dr. Jonathan Harlen serves as a Lecturer and Course Coordinator for the LLB Honours program in the Law discipline within the Faculty of Business, Law and Arts at Southern Cross University, a position he has held since 2018. He earned his BA, LLB (Hons), and PhD from Southern Cross University, with his 2021 doctoral thesis titled Woven law: Te Nakahi and the re-storying of sovereignty in Aotearoa/New Zealand, which examines early post-colonial models of legal pluralism through the lenses of legal history and legal theory. Before entering academia, Harlen worked as a practising solicitor specialising in negligence claims while pursuing a parallel career as a novelist. He has authored more than 30 novels for adults, young adults, and children, with his works published internationally in nine countries. Selected titles include Blood Sports (Scholastic Press), The Cockroach War (Hodder Headline Australia), The Lion and the Lamb (Hodder & Stoughton), Blackeye (Omnibus Books), and The Greening of Copeland Park (Hodder & Stoughton).

In his teaching role, Harlen delivers units in Civil Litigation, Wills and Estates, Intellectual Property, Legal Research and Writing, and all LLB Honours units. Recognised as a Teaching Scholar, he co-created a new H5P Resource Library for SCU Law in 2024, comprising more than 50 interactive law activities. In 2025, he received an SCU Library Open Educational Resources Development Grant to research and author a new textbook for LAWS2018 Wills and Estates. Harlen fosters community ties by organising the Far North Coast High School Mock Trial competition, launching in 2024 with six Lismore schools—where he wrote the cases and coached teams—and expanding in 2025 to sixteen schools across the Gold Coast, Coffs Harbour, and Lismore regions. He has also contributed to public discourse as an intellectual property specialist, commenting on AI's challenges to Australian copyright law and potential reforms like fair use exceptions for text and data mining.