Stephen Peach's documented background is connected with Sydney, New South Wales, where he undertook his university studies and later built his legal career. The city's university, the University of Sydney, was founded in 1850 by an act of the New South Wales Parliament as Australia's first university.
Stephen Peach studied at the University of Sydney, where he obtained a Bachelor of Arts and a Bachelor of Laws. The university was founded on principles of religious tolerance and admission on academic merit, ideas that were new in the mid-nineteenth century and challenged traditional university models.
The institution began with a small faculty of arts and added faculties of law, medicine, and science in the 1880s and 1890s. Its legal education therefore developed alongside the expansion of the university in the colonial and early federal period of New South Wales.
Peach's documented professional career centres on legal practice in Sydney. He was admitted to the bar in Australia in 1982 and later worked as a partner of the Phillips Fox law firm.
Phillips Fox traced its origins to 1864, when it began as P.D. Phillips, and it grew into one of the larger law firms in Australasia. In 2006 the firm entered an alliance with the global firm DLA Piper and began trading as DLA Phillips Fox. The firm was absorbed into DLA Piper in 2011 when DLA Piper opened for business in Australia.
