Tanya Josev

Associate Professor Tanya Josev is a legal historian at the Melbourne Law School, University of Melbourne, researching in contemporary Australian and American legal and political history. A BA LLB (Hons) and PhD graduate of the University of Melbourne, her doctoral thesis won the Dennis-Wettenhall Prize for the best thesis in Australian history in 2015. Prior to academia, she practiced as a lawyer at Allens and served as an associate to the late Justice Alan Goldberg AO of the Federal Court of Australia. Tanya was one of the Law School's inaugural PhD Teaching Fellows, former editor of the Melbourne University Law Review, and in 2010-11, held a Hauser Global Fellowship at New York University's School of Law, supported by various scholarships including from the Australian Federation of Graduate Women and the Alma Hansen Bequest.

Her research interests encompass the status of judicial archives, the origins and evolution of the binary understanding of the judicial role as involving 'activism' and 'restraint' across common law jurisdictions, judicial biography, and Australian legal and political history including private law topics. Notable publications include her book The Campaign Against the Courts: A History of the Judicial Activism Debate (Federation Press, 2017), which earned the Law & Society Association of Australia and New Zealand’s Early Career Researcher prize in 2018; an article assessing the role of history and historiography in High Court of Australia judgments published in the Melbourne University Law Review; a reassessment of Sir Owen Dixon’s advocacy for an Australian common law published by Federation Press; an examination of judicial biography in Australia in the University of New South Wales Law Journal; and a narrative on the early years of the judicial activism debate in the United States in Studies in Law, Politics and Society. In 2022, she received the University of Melbourne's Woodward Medal in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Tanya serves as Co-Director of the Australian Legal Histories Programme, Coordinator of the MLS Judge in Residence Programme, and holds positions on the University of Melbourne Archives Advisory Board, the editorial board of Legal History journal, and various school committees. She has featured on ABC Radio National discussing the judicial activism debate.

Professional Email: tjosev@unimelb.edu.au