Megan Davis
Professor of Law, UNSW
Profile
Megan Davis is a Cobble Cobble Aboriginal woman who grew up in the North Burnett, in Hervey Bay and Eagleby (Logan City). Megan is a Professor of Law, Faculty of Law, UNSW and a Commissioner of the NSW Land and Environment Court. Professor Davis is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Law and a member of the NSW Sentencing Council.
Megan is the current Chair and expert member of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues which is the peak United Nations body coordinating indigenous issues across the UN system that includes over 200 UN agencies and 195 member states.
Professor Davis has extensive experience as a UN lawyer, participated in the drafting of the UNDRIP text from 1999-2004 and is a former UN Fellow of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in Geneva. Megan teaches for UNITAR on diplomacy in its Peacemaking and Preventive Diplomacy course in Switzerland and the DTP in Australia.
Professor Davis is also a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia.
Professor Davis’ current research is in the area of sentencing laws, violence against Aboriginal women and constitutional design and deliberation. In 2011, Megan was appointed to the Prime Minister’s Expert Panel on the Recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples in the Constitution and in 2016 was appointed by the Prime Minister to the Referendum Council.
She is the co-author with Prof George Williams of ‘Everything you Need to Know About the Referendum to Recognise Indigenous Australians’ (NewSouth Books) and co-author with Prof Marcia Langton of “It’s Our Country: Indigenous Arguments for Meaningful Arguments for Constitutional Recognition and Reform” (MUP).
Megan is an admitted Legal Practitioner of the Supreme Court of the A.C.T. although currently not practising.
Megan supports the North Queensland Cowboys and the Queensland Maroons.