Research Scholarships at Melbourne Law School in Australia

Applications are invited from suitably qualified scholars for two PhD scholarships to undertake a higher degree by research, and join Professor Adrienne Stone’s Kathleen Fitzpatrick Australian Laureate Fellowship Program in Comparative Constitutional Law.   Successful candidates must commence the scholarship between December 2017 and February 2018.

Melbourne Law School (MLS) is Australia’s first all-graduate law faculty. Melbourne Law School was the first faculty in Australia to teach law, and awarded this country’s first law degrees. The Law School is now fully graduate with its Juris Doctor for admission to practice recognised as a high level qualification in Australia and beyond. Coupled with the unrivalled excellence of Melbourne Law Masters and its excellent Graduate Research Degree programs, the Law School offers a unique opportunity for the integration of scholarship and teaching.

The Laureate Program in Comparative Constitutional Law aims to address a problem for liberal democracies: the need to reconcile the tensions between the pursuit of diversity and the promotion of social cohesion. The critical problem is becoming increasingly urgent as nations grapple with the challenges of highly diverse multi-cultural societies. The team working on the Fellowship will draw on the experiences of constitutionalism throughout the world to investigate how Constitutions, in their design and in their application, can serve as a unifying force while still nurturing the diversity appropriate for a complex, modern society.

This program will develop a new and comprehensive framework in which to understand how constitutions should balance the achievement of social cohesion while nurturing social diversity. Its core elements are in:

1. Identifying and developing the understanding of how constitutions balance their unifying role with the need to foster diversity;
2. Explaining and justifying the mechanisms by which constitutions balance these; and
3. Using a broad comparative study of these phenomena to generate progress in the development of methodologies in comparative constitutional law.

Candidates’ research proposals should identify an innovative research question relevant to the themes of the Laureate Project.  Projects may wish to focus on questions of constitutional design including novel constitutional forms such as constitutional statutes, directive principles and non-binding declarations of constitutional principles. Alternatively, projects may focus on methods of constitutional reasoning or may identify a political or legal challenge such as developing constitutional responses to diversity (religious, cultural, linguistic or ideological).  Proposals on related questions will also be considered. Projects should identify the contribution the project will make to existing understandings. Projects should be focused on constitutional law or design, be comparative in scope, and be framed with careful attention to the question of comparative methodology.

Stipend and Benefits

Scholarship recipients undertaking research through the Laureate Program will be awarded an annual stipend of AUD$34,682 (tax free), and will be eligible to apply for up to AUD$4,000 project funding over the course of their candidature for approved travel and conference attendance. The scholarship is available for a maximum period of four years, with no extensions possible.

A relocation allowance of AUD $2,000 may be granted for candidates who need to move from outside Victoria or AUD $3,000 for candidates who need to move from outside Australia to study at the University of Melbourne.

Eligibility

Eligible applicants must:

1. have an Honours 1 or high 2A (or equivalent) undergraduate degree in law;
2. be available to undertake research full-time;
3. not be receiving similar funding or stipend from another Commonwealth programme;
4. not have completed a degree at the same   level or at a higher level in the same field of endeavour;
5. not have previously held a Research Training Program Scholarship (RTPS), Australian Postgraduate Award (APA) or Australian Postgraduate Award Industry (APAI) unless it was terminated within the first six months of the earlier award.

Official Link

Deadline: 9th July 2017