Julian Burnside
Australian barrister and activist
Julian William Kennedy Burnside (born 9 June 1949) is an Australian barrister, human rights and refugee advocate, and author. He practises principally in commercial litigation, trade practices and administrative law. He is best known for his staunch opposition to the mandatory detention of asylum seekers, and has provided legal counsel in a wide variety of high-profile cases.
He was made an Officer of the Order of Australia in 2009, "for service as a human rights advocate, particularly for refugees and asylum seekers, to the arts as a patron and fundraiser, and to the law." He unsuccessfully stood for the Division of Kooyong at the 2019 federal election as an Australian Greens candidate, but achieved the highest vote for the Greens in the seat at a federal election and allowed the party to enter into the two-party preferred vote.
Early life
Burnside was born in Melbourne, Victoria to Kennedy Byron Burnside and Olwen Lloyd Banks. His father was a prominent surgeon and his grandmother Dame Edith Burnside was a prominent charity worker. Burnside attended Melbourne Grammar School, graduating with a range of scholarships and prizes. He then studied law and economics at Monash University, with aspirations to eventually work as a management consultant. While at university, Burnside showed immense talent for the study of law and successfully competed in Moot Court competitions (mock court). He was selected to represent Monash at an international competition in New Zealand, in which he was named best speaker and won the Blackstone Cup.
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This entry incorporates text from “Julian Burnside” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.