Honorary Bencher of Gray’s Inn
Professor of Tort Law and Civil Justice
School of Law, Queen Mary University of London
Rachael Mulheron KC (Hon), and honorary bencher at Gray’s Inn, is professor of tort law and civil justice at the law department, Queen Mary University of London, where she has taught since 2004. Rachael's principal fields of academic research concern class actions jurisprudence, tort law, medical negligence, and civil procedure more generally. Rachael has assisted various overseas law reform commissions, government departments, and NGOs, particularly on collective redress-related matters. She publishes regularly in that area, and in numerous areas of tort-related litigation, and her publications across those fields have been judicially cited in several jurisdictions, including Australia, Canada, England, New Zealand, Singapore, Chile, and South Africa. She is also author of the popular book, Principles of Tort Law, now in its 2nd edn (CUP, 2020).
In 2009, Rachael was appointed as a member of the Civil Justice Council of England and Wales (CJC), the jurisdiction's civil justice law reform body, and thereafter served on the CJC for nine years, during which time she chaired several Governmental Working Parties, including: the peer review of third party funding (2014), the reform of damage-based agreements (2014–15), the reform of concurrent expert evidence (2016), and the examination of both present and future utility of 'before-the-event' insurance (2017). She was also appointed by the Government as co-reviewer of the DBA Regulations 2013 in 2019, and in that capacity, co-authored a report for the MOJ with suggestions for reform of the law governing damages-based agreements.
In 2014, Rachael was a member of the rules-drafting committee of the Competition Appeal Tribunal, which was tasked with producing rules of court to implement a new collective proceedings regime for competition law grievances, which came into force in October 2015. This sectoral regime represents the first collective actions regime in the United Kingdom which is capable of catering for opt-out class actions.
Prior to her academic career, Rachael practised as a litigation solicitor in Brisbane, Australia, both in general practice (as a trainee solicitor) and then predominantly in construction law disputes.