Professor EmeritusBarbara McDonald

BA LLB (Sydney) LLM (Lond)

Barbara McDonald was appointed an Emeritus Professor on her retirement from the University of Sydney Law School in 2023, where she continues to teach occasionally. She has taught Torts, Equity, Torts and Contracts II, Foundations of Law and Media Law in the undergraduate programme, and Statutory Foundations of Negligence, Comparative Media Law and Advanced Obligations and Remedies in the postgraduate programme. She is also an Honorary (Senior Fellow) at the University of Melbourne, teaching Privacy and the Media in 2024.

Barbara is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Law. She served as Commissioner of the Australian Law Reform Commission in Sydney heading the Inquiry into Serious Invasions of Privacy in the Digital Era in 2013-2014. Legislation largely based on that report was passed by Federal Parliament in December 2024. She was recently appointed as a member of the Judicial Commission of New South Wales.

She was a consultant to Herbert Smith Freehills for many years and has conducted continuing legal education seminars at a number of leading law firms.

She is a graduate of the University of Sydney in Arts and Law (BA/)LLB and University College London. (LLM) She was Pro Dean of the Sydney Law School from 2002-2004 and held other senior administrative positions in the Law School related to teaching. Barbara has been Visiting Professor in Law to the New College of the Humanities in London and to the University of Texas at Austin.

She was the academic member of the Law Society of New South Wales Specialist Accreditation Board Personal Injuries Law Advisory Committee for many years.

Barbara is the co-editor of a casebook on the law of torts, and a member of the editorial board of the Torts Law Journal. She recently contributed six chapters to the new 11th edition of Fleming's Law of Torts, and has written extensively on the law of privacy, confidential information and general statutory reform in private law with articles published in the Journal of Contract Law, the Sydney Law Review, the Australian Bar Review, the Torts Law Journal, the Commercial Law Quarterly, and in international journals. She is a co-author of Celebrity and the Law, published in 2010.