Paula Gerber is an Australian lawyer and legal academic. After practising law in London, Los Angeles and Melbourne, she became a professor at Monash University, where her research and teaching span construction law and international human rights law, including the rights of LGBTI people.
Background
Paula Gerber was born in Australia. She finished high school at the age of 16 and then worked as an articled clerk in a Brisbane law firm while studying law part-time. Articled clerkship was a traditional form of practical training in which a trainee worked under a practising lawyer before being admitted to the legal profession.
Her Queensland admission in 1986 marked the end of this initial stage of training. She was later admitted in England and Wales in 1989, in California in 1990, and in New South Wales and Victoria in 1995, reflecting a legal career that crossed three common-law jurisdictions.
Education
Gerber's first degree was a Bachelor of Laws from the Queensland Institute of Technology, completed in 1986. The institute was established at Gardens Point in Brisbane in 1965 to offer professional and technical courses, and its School of Law enrolled its first Bachelor's degree students in 1977. Gerber studied within the school's first decade of law teaching. The institute later became the Queensland University of Technology after it was granted university status in 1988, with operations beginning in January 1989.
She then completed a Master of Science with Distinction in construction law at King's College London in 1991. King's, founded in 1829, is one of the constituent colleges of the University of London. Her later studies moved to Victoria, where she completed a Master of Laws in public international and comparative law at Monash University in 2002. Monash, founded in 1958, is one of Australia's larger universities.
Gerber completed a PhD in law at the University of Melbourne in 2008. Her thesis was titled From Convention to Classroom: the Long Road to Human Rights Education. The University of Melbourne, founded in 1853, is one of Australia's oldest universities and was the institution at which she began her academic career.
Career
Gerber's professional career began in private practice abroad. From 1987 to 1990 she worked as a solicitor with Baker & McKenzie in London, an international law firm founded in Chicago in 1949 that expanded across many countries in the decades after the Second World War. From 1991 to 1994 she worked as an associate at Hunt Ortmann Attorneys in Los Angeles, a firm in the American legal market where she had been admitted to practise in California in 1990.
Returning to Australia, she joined Mallesons Stephen Jaques as a senior associate from 1995 to 1997. The firm, later known as King & Wood Mallesons, was one of Australia's large commercial law firms. From 1997 to 1999 she was a partner at Maddocks, a Melbourne law firm. Her legal practice in Melbourne thus followed her earlier experience in London and Los Angeles.
In 2000 she moved from private practice into academia as a senior fellow in the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning at the University of Melbourne. During the same years she worked as a consultant with Lander & Rogers, a Melbourne law firm, and as an assessor of trainee mediators with the Australian Institute of Arbitrators & Mediators, a professional body for arbitrators and mediators in Australia.
She moved to Monash University in late 2004 and became a senior lecturer in 2005. She was promoted to associate professor in 2012 and to professor in 2016. At Monash she became deputy director of the Castan Centre for Human Rights Law, a research centre focused on international and domestic human rights law. She has also been a sessional member of the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal in its Building List, a role that connects her construction law expertise with a statutory tribunal that resolves building disputes.
Gerber's scholarship developed in two main fields: construction law, where she pioneered the teaching of the subject in Australian universities, and international human rights law, with a focus on children's rights and the rights of LGBTI people.
Achievements
Pioneered the teaching of construction law in Australian universities. Her contribution to construction law education and scholarship has been recognised with several awards, and her work on dispute avoidance processes has informed Australian discussion of alternatives to adversarial construction litigation.
Works
edited book
Critical Perspectives on Human Rights Law in Australia
(Two-volume collection co-edited by Gerber and Melissa Cas...)
2021
Current Trends in the Regulation of Same-Sex Relationships
(Co-edited by Gerber and Adiva Sifris and published by the...)
(Co-authored with Brennan Ong and published by LexisNexis ...)
2013
Views
Gerber's public work reflects a commitment to justice and dignity for all, and she has presented her career as an ongoing commitment to human rights. In her writing on trans rights in Australia she argues that public debate and law reform should rest on evidence rather than emotion. She has stressed that trans and gender-diverse people are far more likely to be victims of vilification and discrimination than perpetrators of hate or violence, and her work aims to educate allies so that trans and gender-diverse people can live with dignity and equality.
Membership
Gerber is a founding partner of DAPs Australia, an organisation established to promote the use of dispute avoidance processes in the Australian construction industry. She is also the chair of Kaleidoscope Human Rights Foundation, a not-for-profit organisation that advocates for better protection of LGBTQIA+ rights in the Asia-Pacific region, where many countries still criminalise same-sex sexual conduct.
Founding partner
DAPs Australia
,
Australia
Chair
Kaleidoscope Human Rights Foundation
,
Australia
Interests
Music & Bands
Gerber has said that she loves musicals.
References
LexisNexis Authors and Experts: Dr Paula Gerber
Publisher author profile summarising Gerber's academic qualifications, her career in private practice in London, Los Angeles and Melbourne, and her work in construction law.
About Paula Gerber
Personal website page setting out Gerber's legal admissions, employment history and academic qualifications.
Paula Gerber
The Conversation contributor profile describing Gerber's career as a lawyer in London and California before her move into academia, and her current professorship in human rights law at Monash University.
