Ronli Sifris

Ronli Sifris is a Senior Lecturer in Monash University’s Faculty of Law, a Deputy Director of the Castan Centre for Human Rights Law, and Co-Convener of the Law, Health and Wellbeing Group. She completed a LLM as a Hauser Scholar at NYU School of Law and a PhD at Monash University. Her research focus is on the intersection of reproductive health / rights and the law at both the international and domestic level. As such, she has published extensively on issues such as abortion, involuntary sterilisation and surrogacy. 

Her book, Reproductive Freedom, Torture and International Human Rights: Challenging the Masculinisation of Torture (Routledge, 2014) was launched by the then Hon Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Victoria, Marilyn Warren AC and has been the subject of favourable book reviews. In addition to numerous journal articles and book chapters, Ronli has Co-Edited two special issues of high quality journals; an issue of the Griffith Law Review focusing on “Gender, Health and the Law” and an issue of the Journal of Law and Medicine focusing on “Commercial Surrogacy – What Role of Law”.

Further, in an effort to influence real legal change she has made submissions to a number of different Parliamentary Inquiries / Law Reform Commission Inquiries and has been cited / extensively quoted in the resulting reports. Most recently, she achieved significant research impact when the High Court of Australia accepted her application to appear as “amicus curiae” to assist in its deliberations on a recent constitutional challenge.

You can find her on Twitter @RonliSifris and some of her papers on SSRN at http://ssrn.com/author=1444937.

Areas of Expertise