Robert Mullins is an Associate Professor in the TC Beirne School of Law at the University of Queensland. He holds a Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Laws from the University of Queensland, as well as a BPhil in Philosophy and a DPhil in Law from the University of Oxford, where he studied as a 2008 Rhodes Scholar. Mullins has been a faculty member in law at the University of Queensland since 2015. His research expertise is in legal philosophy and the theory of legal reasoning. Much of his published work investigates the implications of different accounts of the meaning and use of deontic language developed by logicians and linguists for the understanding of legal rights, obligations, and authority relations. His most recent work focuses on logics of common law reasoning developed by scholars in Artificial Intelligence and Law. Additional interests include theories of legal authority, semantics and pragmatics of legal language, formal theories of rights and rights-reasoning, and explainability in the automation of legal reasoning.

Mullins has published in leading journals such as Legal Theory, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, Philosophical Studies, Ergo, Artificial Intelligence and Law, and Jurisprudence. Key publications include 'Protected Reasons and Precedential Constraint' (Legal Theory, 2020), 'Moral Conflict and the Logic of Rights' (Philosophical Studies, 2020), 'Presupposing Legal Authority' (Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, 2022), 'Formalizing Reasons, Oughts, and Requirements' (Ergo, 2021), 'Two Factor-Based Accounts of Precedential Constraint: A Comparison and Proposal' (Artificial Intelligence and Law, 2023), and forthcoming 'Does Nature Need Rights?' (with Lael Weis, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, 2025) and 'Weight and Precedent in Formal Models of Precedential Constraint' (Jurisprudence, 2025). He received a University of Queensland Early Career Researcher Grant in 2020 for 'The Automation of Case-Based Reasoning in Law'. Mullins serves as Reviews Editor for the journal Law and Philosophy, is an Associate Investigator at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society, teaches contract law, and has supervised PhD completions on topics including Waldron's conception of the rule of law, legal review of autonomous weapons systems, and law as a MacIntyrean practice.

Professional Email: r.mullins@law.uq.edu.au