Rate My Professor Tyrone Kirchengast

Professor Tyrone Kirchengast is Professor of Criminal Law and Program Director for Criminology at the University of Sydney Law School. He holds a BA (Hons) and LLB (Hons) from Macquarie University, a Graduate Diploma in Legal Practice from the College of Law, and a PhD from La Trobe University. A member of the Sydney Institute of Criminology, Kirchengast specializes in criminal law, with research interests encompassing victim rights, criminal justice processes, restorative justice, victim participation in adversarial trials, anti-homosexual violence, revenge porn criminalisation, hybrid criminal courts, deepfakes and image manipulation, and improving victims' access to justice. He serves as series co-editor for Palgrave Studies in Victims and Victimology and has published extensively on the integration of victims in the adversarial criminal trial. His scholarship examines international, regional, and domestic human rights frameworks establishing victim rights, as well as comparative analyses across jurisdictions including Germany, France, Sweden, Austria, the Netherlands, England and Wales, Ireland, Scotland, the USA, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, India, South Africa, Japan, and Brazil.

Kirchengast's key publications include the books Victimology and Victim Rights: International Comparative Perspectives (2016), Victims and the Criminal Trial, which addresses victim participation across pre-trial processes, restorative interventions, jury trials, sentencing, appeals, parole, and compensation; The Victim in Criminal Law and Justice (2006), tracing victim development from feudal law; The Criminal Trial in Law and Discourse, analyzing competing justice discourses; and Criminal Law in Australia, co-authored with Lorraine Finlay. Prominent articles feature 'Deepfakes and image manipulation: criminalisation and control' (2020), 'Transforming crime victims’ rights: from myth to reality' (2020), 'The mixed and hybrid criminal courts of Brazil: Mainstreaming restoration, rehabilitation and community justice in a human rights context' (2020), 'Victim legal representation and the adversarial criminal trial' (2021), 'The Expressive Function of #VictimsLaw' (2021), 'The Scott Johnson Case: Prosecuting anti-homosexual violence in New South Wales' (2023), and 'Victimhood, truth and criminal justice failure in relation to anti-homosexual violence and killings in New South Wales' (2019). Previously, he was Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Law at the University of New South Wales and Associate Lecturer in the Division of Law at Macquarie University. Joining Sydney Law School in 2018 as Associate Professor, his contributions have advanced global understandings of victim rights and criminal justice reform.