Christine Parker Visiting Fellow
Christine Parker is a Professor of Law at University of Melbourne, Australia where she teaches corporate social responsibility and business regulation, legal ethics, food law and policy, and animals and the law. She has previously held positions at Griffith University, University of New South Wales, the Australian National University and Monash University. She holds a BA (Hons) and LLB (Hons) from The University of Queensland and a PhD from the Australian National University.
Christine has a deep interest in both conceptualizing and communicating how law and regulation can help people, animals and businesses live more sustainably and well within our ecological, social and economic systems. Professor Parker has written, researched and consulted widely on how and why business comply with legal, social and environmental responsibilities, and what difference regulatory enforcement makes. Her books include The Open Corporation (2002) on corporate social responsibility, business compliance systems and democratic accountability of companies; Explaining Compliance (2011, with Vibeke Nielsen), an edited collection of the leading practice and policy oriented empirical research on how and why businesses do and do not comply with the law. She is also the co-author of Inside Lawyers’ Ethics, the influential textbook on lawyers’ professional conduct in social context. She is also co-producer of a live multi-media eco-music performance, Music for a Warming World, that encourages individual, social and political responses to climate change.
Professor Parker’s current research focuses on the politics, ethics and regulation of food and sustainable food systems, and especially the use of animals in the food system. Her research on whether higher welfare labelling of animal food products makes any difference has been published in a range of law reviews. She is currently developing a new project on the possibility for a transformed relationship with animals and ecosystems in our food system.
