Human rights, explained by an actual human.
I'm Dr Zach Richards — award-winning author, law professor, reformed lawyer. I think, teach, write and rant about the rights you already have, and the systems that keep forgetting you have them.
If you're a human, you'll probably like my stuff. You have the right not to.
15+
Years teaching law & rights
Oxford.
& UNSW guest speaker
UKAJI
Prize-winning research
Award-Winning Scholar
UKAJI New Voices Award
Responsive Legality
Unabridged · 2nd edition
Institutional Standing & Track Record
Trusted by the institutions that teach, shape, and defend the law.
Routledge-published scholarship, in law libraries worldwide. Winner of the UKAJI New Voices Award. Fifteen years teaching thousands of law students who mostly stayed awake.
Oxford University
Guest Speaker & Visiting Scholar
UNSW Sydney
Law Faculty & Senior Lecturer
United Nations Projects
Collaborative Human Rights Research
Amnesty International
Due Process & Rights Projects
Routledge Publishing
Published in 100+ Law Libraries
UKAJI Sheffield
New Voices in Justice Award
15+ Years
Teaching law across 4 universities and 2 countries to thousands of students.
Supreme Court & Policy
Former NSW Supreme Court clerk and federal advisor on immigration policy.
100+ Libraries
Routledge-published scholarship stocked in major academic law libraries globally.
Unabridged audiobook
2nd edition
Responsive Legality
Twenty-First Century Justice
Dr Zach Richards
The audiobook
Responsive LegalityTwenty-First Century Justice
Every day, decisions get made about you by people you'll never meet — visa officers, tribunals, agencies, algorithms. Most of us find out how that works only when it goes wrong.
This is the book about the legal and moral values public officials actually use when they decide, and what good administrative justice is supposed to look like in the twenty-first century.
It is a serious book. It is not a heavy listen.
Listen on
Roughly the length of a long-haul flight. Considerably more useful than the film.
Prefer print?
Responsive Legality: The New Administrative JusticeRoutledge, 2019 · ISBN 9780367895303
Speaking
I'll come and say something worth hearing.
I've spoken at Oxford, lectured across four universities and two countries, and advised government on the policy side of immigration and citizenship. I know how to make a room care about administrative law, which is the single least likely sentence in this website.
Tell me the audience and the date. I'll tell you straight away if I'm the right fit — and if I'm not, I'll usually know who is.
- UN & Amnesty
- Collaborated with colleagues on projects with the United Nations and Amnesty International
- Founder
- Australian College of Law and Justice, and the Law Tuition Academy
- 15 years
- Teaching law across four universities and two countries
Who books me
- Universities and law schools
- Government departments and public-sector teams
- Law firms and professional bodies
- Conferences, panels and festivals
- Leadership, DEI and ethics programmes
The talks
Each one adapts to your audience and your slot.
- 01
Responsive Legality
What justice looks like when the state is the one making the decision.
- 02
Rights You Didn't Know You Had
A plain-English tour of the protections nobody ever explained to you.
- 03
The Algorithm Will See You Now
Automated decision-making and the future of due process.
- 04
Teaching Law to People Who Hate Law
On making hard ideas land, and why most of us get it wrong.
- 05
Building a Law School From Scratch
What founding the Australian College of Law and Justice taught me about who legal education is actually for.
What organisers say
The room usually stays.
We booked Zach expecting a lecture and got something closer to a very good stand-up set about administrative law. Three hundred students, nobody on their phone. I have not seen that before.
Dr Priya RaghavanAssociate Dean, School of Law·Placeholder University Our policy team works with this material every day and still learned something. He pitched it to the room rather than at it, and the Q&A ran forty minutes over because nobody wanted to leave.
Marcus FeldDirector of Policy·Placeholder Department Easy to work with, turned up prepared, and did the one thing most speakers will not — he actually read the brief. Our partners were still quoting him a month later.
Aoife BrennanHead of Learning & Development·Placeholder LLP
Booking
Check my availability.
Tell me the audience and the date. I will tell you straight away if I am the right fit — and if I am not, I will usually know who is.
- Response time
- Usually within two working days
- Based in
- Sydney, Australia — travelling worldwide
- Also available for
- Media, podcasts, expert comment
About
The short version
I started as a litigation lawyer, clerked for a judge at the Supreme Court of NSW, and wrote policy for the Australian Federal Government's immigration department. Then I did a PhD in human rights law and spent fifteen years teaching it.
Somewhere in there I worked out that the ideas were fine — it was the delivery that was killing everyone. So now I write, speak and occasionally rant about human rights in a way that doesn't require a law degree to follow.
Based in Sydney. Available most places.
Weekly
Things I've been thinking about
New piece every week. Rights, justice, and whatever is currently going wrong. No posting schedule guilt, no listicles, no “5 things successful people do before 6am.”
Get the weekly one.
One email a week. The new piece, plus anything worth flagging. Unsubscribe whenever — you have the right.
No spam. No selling your address. Obviously.