Dr Kelley Burton

Biography

Since 2000, Kelley has worked as an academic in the QUT School of Law. Kelley has taught 11 undergraduate core law units spanning across all year levels of the law degree, including skills based units. Her outstanding teaching and learning performance and ongoing efforts in supporting innovative ways of learning have been recognised by the following teaching awards:

• 2001 QUT Faculty of Law Achievement in Teaching (Casual Academics) Award;
• 2003 QUT Compassionate Pioneer Award;
• 2003 QUT Faculty of Law Excellence in Teaching Commendation Award;
• 2004 QUT Faculty of Law Excellence in Teaching Award;
• 2006 QUT Faculty of Law Students’ Voice Award;
• 2008 QUT Vice-Chancellor's LEX Survey Achievement Award;
• 2008 QUT Vice-Chancellor's LEX Achievement Award for the LWB238 Fundamentals of Criminal Law teaching team;
• 2009 QUT Faculty of Law Teaching and Learning Achievement Award; and
• 2010 QUT Vice-Chancellor's Performance Award for Excellence in Teaching.

Kelley won the 2014 CCH-ALTA Best Legal Education Conference Paper for her conference paper title, 'Changing Assessment Tasks in Legal Education in Turbulent Times:  Authentic or Traditional?'. 

Kelley has co-authored three texts on criminal law, which have been designed to provide a thorough grounding on the fundamental principles of criminal law;  provide criminal law students in Queensland and Western Australia with instant and worthwhile feedback on how to apply the criminal law to a problem-based questions;  encourage critical thinking and drive curiousity about how the criminal law could be continuously improved. The citations of the texts are:   K Burton, T Crofts and S Tarrant, Principles of Criminal Law in Queensland and Western Australia, Thomson Reuters, Sydney, 2011. T Crofts and K Burton, The Criminal Codes: Commentary and Materials, 6th edition, Thomson Reuters, Sydney, 2009. K Burton & G Mackenzie, Butterworths Questions and Answers: Criminal Law in Queensland and Western Australia, LexisNexis Butterworths, Australia, 2006. In 2009, Kelley was the first student to complete a PhD in Law at USQ. 

Kelley's thesis entitled "A Principled Approach to Criminalisation: When Should Making and/or Distributing Visual Recordings be Criminalised?" takes a principled approach to examining the criminalisation of making and/or distributing visual recordings by exploring constructs of privacy, harm, morality, culpability, consent, punishment, social welfare and individual autonomy. This is a contemporary topic given the widespread use of digital cameras, mobile phone cameras, video cameras, web cams, the internet, email, the blogosphere, privacy concerns and shifts in modern culture. 

From September 2008 until September 2012, Kelley was a Law Editor for the QUT Law and Justice Journal.  From July 2008 until early 2010, Kelley was the Criminal Law Interest Group Convenor for the Australasian Law Teachers Association.

In January 2007, Kelley was invited to be a Visiting Professor at the University of Western Ontario (UWO), in Canada, where she taught a unit titled, Privacy and Criminal Law, which she designed around her cutting edge PhD research.

Kelley has contributed to the QUT Faculty of Law's research culture by publishing a range of peer reviewed scholarly journal articles, book chapters, and international and national conference papers. Some of these publications are available online. 

In 2005, Kelley won the prize for the Best Research Paper at the University of Queensland TC Beirne School of Law Postgraduate Law Research Colloquium, which was attended by postgraduate law students from across Australia. Kelley completed her LLM at QUT and received the award for the Highest Graduating Grade Point Average in the Master of Laws by coursework.  

Research interests

• Scholarship of Teaching;
• Authentic Assessment;
• Assessing Reflective Practice;
• Criterion-referenced Assessment;
• Assessing Skills; and
• Criminal Law & Justice.