Tamar Hopkins

PhD Candidate

Tamar commenced her PhD at UNSW in 2018. Tamar was admitted to practice in 2000 and has worked as a lawyer at the Legal Aid Office (ACT) Welfare Rights and Legal Centre (ACT), Tenants Union (Vic), Welfare Rights Unit (Vic), Flemington & Kensington Community Legal Centre (Vic). Tamar was awarded a Victorian Law Foundation Fellowship in 2008 to study police complaint systems in the UK, Canada and US. She was awarded LIV Community Lawyer of the Year in 2010 and a Reichstein Fellowship to study progressive organisations and the Black Lives Matter movement in the US with Australian Progress in 2015. She worked from 2005 as a solicitor for the applicants in the Haile-Michael v Konstantindis racial profiling claim that settled in the Federal Court in 2013. She also acted for Corinna Horvath in the successful UN Human Rights Committee claim Horvath v Australia (decision date 2014).

Areas of research

Police Accountability, Police Complaints/Litigation, Racial Profiling, Data Collection on Institutional Racism, Racism/Institutional Racismm, Proving discrimination, Criminal Law, Police Powers, Alternatives to police

Supervisors

Janet Chan, Vicki Sentas, David Dixon

Publications and presentations

• Forthcoming: 2020 Hopkins T, 'Litigating Racial Profiling: examining the evidence for institutional racial profiling by police against African-Australians in Flemington, Victoria' Australian Journal of Human Rights.
• 2017 Hopkins T, ‘Monitoring Racial Profiling’ Introducing a scheme to prevent unlawful stops and searches by Victoria Police’ 2017, Police Stop Data Working Group, FKCLC
• 2016 Meghan Fitzgerald, Tamar Hopkins & Shen Narayanasamy (2016) ‘Justice, Social Action and Structural Change,’ Australian Feminist Law Journal, 42(2) 351. Edited transcript of a panel discussion from the Justice through Conflict; Conflict through Justice Symposium.
• 2015 Hopkins, T ‘Racial Profiling and the Road Safety Act 1986 (Vic)’ (2015) 40 AltLJ 247.
• 2011 Hopkins, T ‘When police complaint mechanisms fail: The use of civil litigation’ (2011) 36 AltLawJ 99.
• 2007 Hopkins, T ‘Policing in an era of human rights’ (2007) 32 AltLJ 224.
• 2007 Hopkins, T ‘Complaints against police behaviour in Flemington, Victoria’, (2007) AltLawJl 9;
• 2005 Hopkins, T ‘Divorcing marital status from social security payments’ 2005 AltLawJl 57.
• 2016 ‘Making Human Rights Matter to IBAC’ – FKCLC http://www.policeaccountability.org.au/commentary/making-human-rights-matter-to-ibac/
• Tamar Hopkins, ‘Effective Investigation of Complaints Against Police’, 2009, FKCLC available at http://www.policeaccountability.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/VLF-REPORT-Effective-Investigation.pdf
  supervised by Professor Jude McCulloch (Monash)
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