Andrew Higgins

Andrew is  Professor of Civil Justice Systems at the Law Faculty and a Fellow in Law at Mansfield College. He teaches and convenes the BCL/MJur Principles of Civil Procedure course and FHS Civil Dispute Resolution course. 

Andrew is General Editor of Civil Justice Quarterly and the academic member of the Civil Justice Council. The CJC is an advisory public body which was established under the Civil Procedure Act 1997 with responsibility for overseeing and co-ordinating the modernisation of the civil justice system. He is currently chairing the CJC's review of pre-action protocols.

Andrew completed a BA/LLB (hons) at the University of Melbourne in 2001 and the BCL in 2005. He completed a Dphil at Oxford on legal professional privilege in 2011. He has been a visiting scholar with NYU's Hauser Global Law School Program and is a Senior Teaching Fellow at Melbourne Law School, where he regularly teaches on the Melbourne Law Masters.

From 2011 to 2020 Andrew acted as special counsel for the Australian Government in the defence of is tobacco plain packaging laws from constitutional and intentional legal challenges, including Philip Morris' Investor State Arbitration claim and disputes bought by Dominican Republic and others before the World Trade Organisation. Andrew was also an observer of the WHO-Framework Convention on Tobacco Control's expert group on Article 19 'Liability.' He has helped the World Health Organisation develop an online toolkit to assist Parties reform their civil justice systems as a means of implementing Article 19.

Andrew is a part time practising barrister at the Victorian Bar, and previously worked as a lawyer at the Australian law firm Slater & Gordon. His main area of practice is mass tort litigation, including class actions, and has worked on asylum seeker, asbestos, thalidomide and tobacco cases. He has advised the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission on whether the use of light and mild descriptors for cigarettes constituted misleading advertising, assisted the US Department of Justice on its RICO claim against the US tobacco industry, US v Philip Morris et al and received awards for his work exposing British American Tobacco’s “document retention policies” in McCabe v British American Tobacco including from a coalition of public health NGOs.

Andrew’s main research interests are civil procedure, causation and tort.