Prof. Zoe Robinson has always embraced the unknown with enthusiasm. When presented with the chance to move halfway across the world, she seized it without hesitation. Her curiosity and passion for learning shone through when she first encountered constitutional law, diving in with both feet. Now, she embarks on a new chapter as a member of the Marquette Law School faculty.
Hailing from Australia, Robinson has amassed over a decade of experience as a law professor. She spent most of her career at DePaul University College of Law in Chicago, where she taught from 2009 to 2020. More recently, she served as a professor at the Australian National University Research School of Social Sciences. Among her notable achievements is the creation of the Australian High Court Database, an invaluable resource for Australian scholars and citizens to explore their court’s decisions.
“I clearly have an accent and I’m clearly foreign, but I’m also American in the sense that my whole professional life has been here and I’m an American constitutional lawyer,” says Robinson.
Robinson, who currently teaches Torts, became intrigued by constitutional law and the way that it impacts people when she was in law school in Australia. As Australia is the only Western democracy that does not hold a Bill of Rights, constitutional or statutory, Robinson’s appreciation for constitutional law and implications led her farther away from home than expected, and she relocated to the U.S. to study.
“I love how rights are structured and then how court’s structure those rights to either exclude or include people. So, when my husband and I were looking at going to graduate school, we decided to go to the U.S. because of its rich history of constitutional rights,” says Robinson. Robinson graduated from the University of Chicago Law School with a J.D. and a JSD.
Her research now focuses on constitutional law, constitutional design, judicial politics, and empirical legal studies. She has most recently published an article, “Influencer Speech-Torts” in the Georgetown Law Journal, examining whether the First Amendment limits negligence actions against influencers for misinformation that ultimately causes harm to their followers.
Although a long-time Midwest resident, she did cite one key difference that caused Marquette’s Law School to stand out when looking to move back to the United States.
“Community is important to me. Many of the graduates I teach will stay in Milwaukee and work in the Milwaukee area, which means I can have more of an impact. Faculty as a community was also especially important to me. It’s very tight knit,” says Robinson.
Robinson hopes to be able to encourage students to keep learning and growing by gaining more perspectives from her class.
“In our current political climate and culture, everything that’s constitutional is really on the ground politically right now,” Robinson said.
