School staff

Dr. Anne C Pickering FHEA

Anne is a teaching and research scholar at the Thomas More Law School of the Australian Catholic University (ACU) where she teaches property law, legal ethics and land law. Her research focuses on law reform, particularly in the areas of land tenure, property law, environmental law, legal pluralism and development. More broadly, Anne is interested in interdisciplinary research initiatives and projects that investigate property law and regimes, and current challenges that intersect with environment law, climate change and international law to propose change and develop processes and frameworks that guide policy formulation and inform law reform and governance both nationally and internationally.

Prior to joining ACU, Anne was a scholar with the Centre for Public, International and Comparative Law at T C Beirne School of Law. She wrote "The Employment Contract: Implied Terms" in Employment and Industrial Law in Australia (December 2017, 1st ed., Cambridge University press). Anne contributed to three chapters of the Queensland Lawyers' Companion (Editions 2017 and 2018), a handbook prepared by the Legal Practitioners Admissions Board, Queensland.

In addition to research and teaching, Anne has experience in private legal practice particularly in property and commercial law, professional development, governance, policy and law reform. During 2018 to 2020, she worked as a consultant policy advisor within in a multidisciplinary team of an international development agency. Her main task was to review and provide advice regarding proposed policy, legal, and regulatory changes to improve land transferability, and make recommendations on other policy, legal, and regulatory reforms needed to achieve the objectives of the project.

Anne has a particular interest in teaching and learning - she received the 2023 FLB Executive Dean's Learning and Teaching Innovation and Impact grant at ACU. She was awarded fellowship status of the Higher Education Academy of the United Kingdom (FHEA) in 2021. In 2020 and 2016, Anne acted as a panel judge of the Lawasia International Moot Competition. Anne was the recipient of the 2018 Owen Fletcher Postgraduate Research award at the University of Queensland. In 2008, she was the recipient of the Hernando de Soto fellowship awarded to undertake research and subsequently prepared the International Property Rights Index 2009 (IPRI), which analyses annually, global data to establish the correlation between secure property rights and economic development.