Rate My Professor Reg Graycar

Professor Emeritus Reg Graycar holds the position of Emeritus Professor in The University of Sydney Law School. She earned an LLB with Honours from the University of Adelaide in 1978 and an LLM from Harvard University in 1981. In May 1997, following an extensive international search, she was appointed to Australia's inaugural Dunhill Madden Butler Chair of Women and the Law at Sydney Law School, having previously served as a Professor at the University of New South Wales. From 1998 to 2002, she was a full-time Law Reform Commissioner for New South Wales and a part-time Commissioner of the Australian Law Reform Commission. She commenced practice as a barrister at the New South Wales Bar in 2007, specialising in administrative law, constitutional law, and appellate matters, while maintaining her academic affiliation until her emeritus appointment in 2012. Graycar has held visiting professorial positions at law schools in the United States, Canada, South Africa, and France, and has served on federal tribunals and government advisory bodies. She previously acted as Associate Dean (Postgraduate Research) in the Faculty of Law and was a recipient of Australian Research Council institutional grants.

Graycar's academic career focuses on feminist legal theory and the intersection of gender with law, particularly gendered stereotypes in judicial decision-making, personal injury damages assessments, discrimination against women, and family law. Her seminal co-authored book, The Hidden Gender of Law (Federation Press, 1990, with Jenny Morgan), examines law's hidden gender biases. She collaborated on an Australian Research Council-funded project on intersectionality in family law and a study with the Family Court of Australia evaluating the Family Law Act amendments' impact on children's disputes. With research associate Margie Cronin, she worked on a book assessing gender's influence on judicial decisions in personal injury cases. Graycar devised judicial education programs on personal injury damages and delivered the Douglas McK. Brown Lecture at the University of British Columbia in 1996, titled 'Hoovering as a Hobby and Other Stories: Gendered Assessments of Personal Injury Damages.' She taught courses including Torts, Legal Reasoning and the Common Law System, and co-taught Law and Literature with Professor Bernhard Schlink, contributing to innovations in undergraduate and postgraduate legal education.