Dr Lorne Neudorf

JD (Victoria); LLM (McGill); PhD (Cambridge)

Lorne Neudorf is the Deputy Dean of Law and an Associate Professor in Law at Adelaide Law School, University of Adelaide. He is a member of the Law Society of Ontario, Canada (Barrister & Solicitor) and an Adjunct Professor at Robson Hall, Faculty of Law, University of Manitoba.

On Special Studies Program Leave (Research Sabbatical) January to June 2020 and Visiting Scholar at NYU School of Law

Lorne holds a Doctor of Philosophy in the field of comparative law from the University of Cambridge. During his doctoral studies, he was twice awarded the Sir James Lougheed Award of Distinction. Lorne holds a Juris Doctor from the University of Victoria and a Masters of Law from McGill University. He also practised as an Associate Lawyer at the Toronto office of Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt LLP, one of Canada's premier business law firms.

Lorne's research takes a comparative perspective and focuses on public law, including judicial review, legislation, delegation, the lawmaking process, statutory interpretation, legal institutions, institutional design and government and politics.

Before arriving in Adelaide, Lorne previously held an Associate Professorship and was Founding Faculty in the Faculty of Law at Thompson Rivers University, helping establish the first new law school in Canada in more than 30 years. He also taught English Administrative Law at six colleges of the University of Cambridge and lectured in English common law at Pembroke and King's colleges. Lorne has been awarded five teaching excellence prizes by law students, including both by first year and upper year students.

Lorne has published or edited a number of scholarly collections, journal articles, case comments, book chapters, book reviews, and newspaper op-eds. In 2017, he published a monograph with Springer entitled The Dynamics of Judicial Independence: A Comparative Study of Courts in Malaysia and Pakistan.  In 2018, Lorne was commissioned by Hart/Bloomsbury as the General Editor of a new global book series examining the rule of law in context (with Gabrielle Appleby). The first titles in the series are expected to be published in 2020-21.

In terms of impact, Lorne's research has been cited in books and articles by scholars and others including the Ontario Superior Court of Justice, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Independence of Judges and Lawyers, former Supreme Court of Canada Justice Thomas Cromwell and the Australian Senate Standing Committee on Regulations and Ordinances. It has also been cited in evidence before the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee of the UK Parliament.

Lorne is the co-founder and Editor in Chief of the Canadian Journal of Comparative and Contemporary Law (with C. Hunt and R. Diab), which publishes cutting-edge comparative scholarship on topical legal issues. He was formerly Managing Editor of the Cambridge Journal of International and Comparative Law and was responsible for the production of the innovative UK Supreme Court Yearbook.

Lorne has presented his research at top law schools including those at Cambridge, Oxford, Yale, Stanford, the National University of Singapore, Hong Kong University, New York University, and Humboldt University. He has appeared before the Standing Joint Committee for the Scrutiny of Regulations in the Canadian Parliament, the Regulations Review Committee of the New Zealand Parliament and was invited to given written evidence to a committee of the Australian Senate. He has also made a written submission to the Select Committee on Effectiveness of the System of Committees of the South Australian Parliament.

Lorne has been a visiting scholar at the Australian National University College of Law, the Faculty of Law at Victoria University of Wellington, the Max-Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law in Heidelberg, Clare Hall at the University of Cambridge, the Faculty of Law at the University of Ottawa, and the Bingham Centre for the Rule of Law at the British Institute of International and Comparative Law in London. In 2015, he was elected as an Associate Member of the American Society of Comparative Law. He has also been engaged as a consultant to provide advice to an international tribunal on questions of judicial independence. 

Lorne has been awarded more than $250,000 through fellowships and grants to support his legal research. He is presently undertaking a multi-year study on the parliamentary supervision of delegated legislation in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom, a project funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. As of January 2020, Lorne will be a resident visiting scholar at New York University School of Law in connection with this project.