Professor Carolyn Sutherland is a member of the Labour, Equality and Human Rights Research Group (LEAH) in the Department of Business Law and Taxation at Monash Business School. She was previously the Head of the Department (2021 to 2023), Deputy Head (2016 to 2019), Director of Research (2015 to 2018) and Director of the Higher Degrees by Research program (2013 to 2015). Before joining Monash Business School, Carolyn practised law with Moores Legal, MinterEllison and Phillips Fox (now DLA Piper). 

Research

Carolyn's current research focuses on labour dispute resolution in Southeast Asia; and on processes of judicial decision-making in Australian labour law cases. She has a particular interest in empirical legal and interdisciplinary methods. Carolyn has used quantitative methods to examine complexity in Australian enterprise agreements and to compare worker protection in countries in the Asia-Pacific region. She is the lead CI on an ARC Discovery project (2019-2025) which is investigating the formal and informal regulation of labour disputes in Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam.

Supervision interests

Carolyn's supervision interests include labour law and equal opportunity law, with a particular focus on empirical legal and interdisciplinary research methods.

Teaching

Carolyn lectures in employment law and in research methods for PhD students. She received an Australian Award for University Teaching - Citation for Outstanding Contributions to Student Learning in 2011.