Ronli Sifris is a Senior Lecturer in Monash University’s Faculty of Law and Deputy Director of the Castan Centre for Human Rights Law. She completed a LLM as a Hauser Scholar at NYU School of Law and a PhD at Monash University.

Her research is doctrinal, empirical and interdisciplinary. It is predominantly focused on issues at the intersection of women’s reproductive health and the law (at both the domestic and international level) including abortion, surrogacy, assisted reproduction and involuntary sterilisation. Further, her research spans other spheres of health law, human rights and gender. For example, she has conducted research on conscientious objection in the context of voluntary assisted dying as well as research on the problem of women’s homelessness.

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”. She is also an Editorial Board Member of the Australian Journal of Human Rights.

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. 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 constitutional challenge in the case of Clubb v Edwards.

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

Areas of Expertise