Mary Hartley is an Australian lawyer based in Melbourne, Victoria. She graduated with honours in arts and law from the University of Melbourne, was admitted to the bar in Victoria in 1984, and later worked as a partner at the Melbourne law firm Phillips Fox.
Background
Hartley's documented professional life is centred on Melbourne, Victoria, the city in which she pursued her university studies and later practised law. The University of Melbourne was established by the Victorian Parliament in 1853, a period when the colony's gold-rush prosperity provided the wealth needed to found a university.
The university was conceived as a civilising influence in a period of rapid settlement and commercial growth. Its founders favoured practical subjects, and a law school was added in 1857, making legal education one of its earliest professional programmes.
Education
Hartley studied at the University of Melbourne, where she completed both a Bachelor of Arts with Honours and a Bachelor of Laws with Honours. The university opened its first classes in 1855 with three professors and sixteen students, and it was not a religious institution. Its law school, established in 1857, later became Melbourne Law School, which remains Australia's oldest law school.
Her combined arts and law qualifications reflect the university's early emphasis on useful subjects alongside a broad liberal education. Her admission to the bar in Victoria in 1984 followed her university studies and marked her entry into the legal profession in that state.
Career
Hartley worked as a partner of Phillips Fox, a Melbourne-based law firm. The firm traced its origins to 1864, when it was founded as P.D. Phillips, and it later grew into one of the largest law firms in Australasia.
She was admitted to the bar in Victoria in 1984, establishing her professional qualification as a lawyer in that Australian state. Her legal career developed within the Victorian legal profession, which her university training in arts and law had prepared her to enter.
In November 2006, Phillips Fox entered an exclusive alliance with the global firm DLA Piper and adopted the name DLA Phillips Fox. The Phillips Fox name was later dissolved in 2011, after which the practice continued under the DLA Piper alliance.
