Veronica L. Taylor is an international lawyer and socio-legal scholar. Her work centres on the regulatory dimensions of international and domestic justice. She is internationally known for her work on rule of law promotion and its intermediation as foreign policy, commercial activity and a professional practice.

She has contributed extensively to the study of Asian legal systems. In Japan and Indonesia her work includes empirical and comparative studies of contracts, competition and corporate governance; more recently she has published empirical studies of higher education reform and research and development policy.  She has worked on legal pluralism and legal education in the Philippines and Afghanistan; in Myanmar her work has focussed on the regulatory dimensions of law and rebuilding the higher education system. She has also written and consulted extensively on the regulation of the legal profession in Asia.

Her work draws on 30 years’ professional experience as a designer and implementer of legal reform for international and bilateral aid programmes in 15 countries. The normative core of her work is how to transform legal networks and institutions in Asia in ways that are effective and just, while making powerful actors more accountable.

At ANU, Veronica has been a Director of  the ANU Japan Institute and an ANU Public Policy Fellow. She serves as a non-Executive Director of ANU Enterprise, the commerical arm of the university (from 2020) and of its subsidiary, the Social Research Centre (from 2022).

Her external engagement currently includes serving as a Director of the Australia Japan Innovation Fund, and of the Australia Japan Business Cooperation Committee.  Since 2021 she has been an expert advisor to the Australian government's Regulatory Reform Division, Department of Finance and academic advisor to the National Regualtors Community of Practice.

She was previously a founder and co-convenor of the Australian Law and Justice Development Community of Practice, in partnership with DFAT and Deputy Chair of the Australian goverment's Australia-Japan Foundation.

Over the course of her teaching career, Veronica has supervised more than 40 PhD, Masters and Honours-level research projects. Between 2018-23 she was a Visiting Professor at the University of Tokyo, designing and delivering  a program in South East Asian Business Law. At ANU she designed the postgraduate education program in regulation and governance and currently teaches REGN8024 Regulating Nuclear Capabilities. Between 2013-2022 she was the the national lead coach for Team Australia, an undergraduate experiential learning project which trains Australian undergraduates in competitive negoation and dispute resolution in English and Japanese, as part of the Tokyo-based Intercollegiate Negotiation Competition (INC).

 

Veronica Taylor joined ANU in 2010 as Director of the Regulatory Institutions Network (RegNet) (2010-2014) (now the School of Regulation and Global Governance) and served as Dean of the ANU College of Asia and the Pacific (2014-2016). Prior to joining the ANU, she was Director of the Asian Law Center at the University of Washington, Seattle.

 

 

Research Interest

Law and society in Asia; regulation; corporate governance; rule of law promotion; law and justice reform; policy design; gender equity and inclusion; higher education.