Amanda Whiting joined the Faculty of Law at The University of Melbourne as a Lecturer in 2004. She been a member of the Asian Law Centre since 1999. She has taught in the LLB courses Land, Race and Law in Southeast Asia, Law and Society in Southeast Asia, Law and Civil Society in Asia, History and Philosophy of Law, Property and Principles of Public Law; and in the Graduate subjects Islamic Law and Politics in Asia. and Citizens, Groups and States in Asia. Her research is in the area of human rights institutions and practices in the Asia-Pacific Region, gender and religion, and Malaysian legal history. She is Associate Director (Malaysia) of the Asian Law Centre.
Amanda completed her honours degree in Arts at the University of Melbourne in 1981 and then taught seventeenth and eighteenth century history at the University's History Department over the next decade. She also has a Diploma of Education (1988) and a Graduate Diploma of Indonesian (1995) which was partly undertaken at Universitas Kristen Satya Wacana, Indonesia. She completed her LL.B. with First Class Honours in 2001. In 2007 she completed her doctorate - a feminist analysis of mid-seventeenth century English legal and political history. In 2004 her article "'Some Women can Shift it Well Enough': A Legal Context for Understanding the Women Petitioners of the Seventeenth-Century English Revolution" appeared in 21 Australian Feminist Law Journal 77.
Amanda is the author of 'Situating Suhakam: Human Rights Debates and Malaysia's National Human Rights Commission' (2003) 39 (1) Stanford Journal of International Law 59, and 'In the Shadow of Developmentalism: The Human Rigths Commission of Malaysia at the Intersection of State and Civil Society Priorities in C Raj Kumar and DK Srivastava (ed) Human Rights and Development: Law, Policy and Governance (Hong Kong: LexisNexis Butterworths, 2006), both of which provide a contextualised reading of the meanings that human rights have in Malaysia and for Malaysians.
With Andrew Kenyon and Tim Lindsey (of this Faculty) and Tim Marjoribanks (Faculty of Arts) she is engaged in an ARC funded Discovery Project, 'The Media and ASEAN Transitions: Defamation Law, Journalism and Public Debate in Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore'.
With Dr Carolyn Evans of this Faculty she is the editor of Mixed Blessings: Laws, Religions and Women's Rights in the Asia Pacific Region (Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff, 2006), a book about women's experiences of the dual regimes of law and religion in the Asia-Pacific region.
Amanda is currently writing about the colliding and conflicting understandings of secular and religious law in Malaysia (particularly as they affect women and children); and she is preparing to write a history of the legal profession in Malaysia, focussing on its role as an agent of civil society.
Amanda has been involved with the Australian Journal of Asian Law since its inaugural issue in 1999 and has been an editor since 2002. With Associate Professor Tim Lindsey, Director of the Asian Law Centre, she edited and contributed to Doing Business in Indonesia (Singapore, CCH: 2000).
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