Rate My Professor Petra Mahy

Dr Petra Mahy is an Adjunct Senior Lecturer in the Department of Business Law and Taxation within the Faculty of Business and Economics at Monash University. A lawyer and anthropologist, her research spans socio-legal studies, comparative law, and regulatory studies, focusing on legal and regulatory systems in Southeast Asia, particularly Indonesia, and the Pacific. Her academic interests include labour law, company law, legal history, and gender studies. She is a Chief Investigator on the Australian Research Council Discovery Project 'Formal and Informal Regulation of Labour Disputes in Southeast Asia' (DP190100821, 2019-2025), which examines formal and informal labour dispute resolution mechanisms in Indonesia, the Philippines, and Vietnam. At Monash, she contributes to the Centre for Labour, Organisation and Law and the Asia-Pacific Regulation Research Group. Mahy serves on the Editorial Committee of the Australian Journal of Asian Law.

Mahy's career includes prior roles in the Department of Business Law and Taxation at Monash University, SOAS University of London, and the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies at the University of Oxford. From 2023 to 2024, she advised the Office of the Vice President and Ministry of Justice in the Republic of Palau on legal matters. Her influential publications include 'Indonesia’s Omnibus Law on Job Creation: Legal Hierarchy and Responses to Judicial Review in the Labour Cluster of Amendments' (Asian Journal of Comparative Law, 2022), 'Regulatory Pluralism and the Resolution of Collective Labour Disputes in Southeast Asia' (Journal of Industrial Relations, 2023), 'Indonesia's Omnibus Law on Job Creation: Reducing Labour Protections in a Time of COVID-19' (Monash University LEAH Research Group Working Paper No. 23, 2021), 'COVID-19 and Labour Law: Indonesia' (Italian Labour Law e-Journal, 2020), and 'The Evolution of Company Law in Indonesia: An Exploration of Legal Innovation and Stagnation' (American Journal of Comparative Law, 2013). Recent contributions feature 'Anthropology and Labour Law' in Research Methods in Labour Law: A Handbook (2024) and 'Qualitative Fieldwork' in the Cambridge Handbook of Comparative Law (2024). Her scholarship advances understanding of plural work regulation, legal transplants, and labour protections in developing economies.