Professor Dan Hunter

Biography

Professor Dan Hunter was the founding dean of Swinburne Law School. He is an international expert in internet law, intellectual property and cognitive science models of law. He holds a PhD from Cambridge on the nature of legal reasoning, as well as computer science and law degrees from Monash University and a Master of Laws by research from the University of Melbourne.

He has taught at QUT Law School, New York Law School, the University of Melbourne Law School, the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, Cambridge University and Deakin University. Professor Hunter regularly publishes on the theory of intellectual property and on the intersection of computers and law. His most recent books have been The Oxford Introductions to U.S. Law: Intellectual Property (OUP, 2012), Amateur Media (Routledge, 2012) and For The Win: How Game Thinking Can Revolutionize Your Business (Wharton Digital, 2012) (which has been translated into Chinese, Korean, Spanish and Japanese).

His work has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Joyce Foundation and the Australian Research Council. He has been a judge for the resolution of domain name disputes for the World Intellectual Property Organization and is the recipient of a Fulbright Postgraduate Fellowship, a Fulbright Distinguished Chair, a Smithsonian Fellowship, an American Council of Learned Societies Research Fellowship, a Herchel Smith Research Fellowship in Intellectual Property Law and a Science Commons Fellowship. His research is focused on cultural histories of intellectual property in the postwar period, including work on LEGO bricks, Barbie dolls, modernist furniture, and the social significance of luxury handbags.

Professor Hunter is also a member of Evidence-Based Sentencing and Criminal Justice Project. In the area of sentencing, his work focuses on using technology to make sentencing more efficient and fairer. His recent articles include recommendations for allowing prisoners to access the internet, making internet deprivation a new stand-alone criminal sanction and replacing prisons with technological incarceration. His current focus is on assessing the desirability of computer algorithms being used to make sentencing determinations.