Professor Anna Huggins
Faculty of Business & Law,
School of Law
Biography
Anna is a Professor in the School of Law. Her primary research interests lie in the fields of regulation and compliance, with a particular focus on digital regulation and environmental compliance. Anna publishes widely on evolving regulatory and compliance responses to digitalisation and automation, including rules as code, algorithmic regulation, regulatory technology and digital compliance. She has led projects on these issues funded by the Australian Research Council, CSIRO’s Data61 and Cisco. Anna has also published extensively on environmental regulation and compliance processes, including research monographs with Routledge (2018) and Edward Elgar (2022).Anna is the Director of Studies (Law) and acting Deputy Head of School, having previously served as the acting Director of Education from April 2022 - March 2023, the Director of Undergraduate Programs (Curriculum) from 2017-2020, and the acting Associate Dean, Learning and Teaching from July-December 2018. Anna has a Master of Laws (Research) in legal education, which led to a number of publications on curriculum design in law, as well as a co-authored textbook. She was recognised as a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy in 2020 and is on the Editorial Committee of the Legal Education Review.
Anna holds a PhD from UNSW Law, for which she received a 2015 PhD Excellence Award. She also has a Master of Laws (Research) degree from QUT, and a Bachelor of International Studies/Bachelor of Laws (Hons) degree from UNSW. She is a chief investigator and former co-leader of the Governing Digital Societies research program in QUT’s Digital Media Research Centre. She is interested in supervising research projects in the areas of digital and data-driven regulation, automated compliance, and environmental regulation and compliance.
Before joining QUT, Anna worked at UNSW Law and the NSW Department of Environment and Climate Change. ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-1634-3505
Personal details
Positions
- Professor
Faculty of Business & Law,
School of Law
Keywords
Compliance, Digital regulation, Computational law, Environmental law, Climate law
Research field
Environmental and resources law, Other law and legal studies
Field of Research code, Australian and New Zealand Standard Research Classification (ANZSRC), 2020
Qualifications
- PhD (University of New South Wales)
- Master of Laws (Research) (Queensland University of Technology)
Teaching
Previous units taught:
- LLH206 Administrative Law
- LLB141 Introduction to International Law
- LLB104 Contemporary Law and Justice
Publications
Filter publications:
A complete list of publications is available at: https://www.qut.edu.au/about/our-people/academic-profiles/a.huggins
Supervision
Current supervisions
- Blockchain and the Value of Transparency
PhD, Principal Supervisor
Other supervisors: Professor Felicity Deane, Dr Lachlan Robb, Dr Samuel Roach - Exploring Expository Justice in Australian Climate Change Litigation with Government Litigants
PhD, Principal Supervisor
Other supervisors: Professor Bridget Lewis, Dr Rene Cornish - Machine Learning Technology: Procedural Justice in Decisions Made By Australian Government Agencies
PhD, Principal Supervisor
Other supervisors: Professor Felicity Deane, Dr Henry Fraser - The Relationship Between Uncertainty and Compliance Construction of Climate-Related Financial Disclosures in Australia
PhD, Principal Supervisor
Other supervisors: Professor Mark Burdon
Completed supervisions (Doctorate)
- Rationality in the Automated State: Examining the Extent to which Australia's Judicial Review Principles can Uphold Public Law Expectations for Rationality in the Machine Learning Era (2026)
- A Fidelity Model Approach to Encoding Legislation (2025)
- Social Media Misconduct Dismissals in South Africa: Forms of Hate Speech in First-Instance Employment Decisions (2024)
- Compliance checking of automated vehicle law-abiding behaviour (2023)
- The Rule of Law in Platform Governance: An Empirical Evaluation of the Moderation of Images Depicting Women's Bodies on Instagram (2020)
- Foreign Investment and Sustainable Development: A Critical Analysis From The Sri Lankan Legal Perspective (2019)
Supervision topics
The supervisions listed above are only a selection.