Richard Stewart

I am a PhD(Law) candidate within the Faculty of Business, Law and Arts at Southern Cross University. My scholarly work is in the field of property law and theory. My thesis, titled The Rationality of Property, employs the Personhood Theory of Property that is derived from the philosophy of G.W.F Hegel to posit property as a human-thing relationship that emerges as an aspect of the human condition. Property law, I contend, is the socio-legal construct that responds to the reality of property as a human universal. By responding to property, which it does by recognising and regulating the human-thing relationship, the laws of property and the societal institution they form impact upon the extent to which the subjective human person can emerge, flourish, and have being in the objective world. Property laws are thus fundamental to healthy and well human persons and to the societies they together form and offer as yet untapped opportunities to realise a more sustainable and emancipatory world. I am a proud graduate of the (former) School of Law and Justice at SCU (Assoc. Deg. Law; LLB (Hons 1)) and subsequently completed an LLM at the University of Melbourne in 2010. Vocationally, I have been a practising lawyer since 2004 and have worked at regional and international law firms and as the principal lawyer of a busy inner-city community legal centre. In July 2025 I joined the Faculty of Law at Monash University as a lecturer assigned to the Monash Tax Clinic. I have maintained a private practice since 2011 and have also written coursework materials for, and delivered and assessed units at, both SCU and RMIT University.