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Dr Christopher Rudge (BA Hons I, LLB Hons, PhD, GDLP) is a sociolegal scholar, Lecturer at Sydney Law School, and Deputy Director of Sydney Health Law. His research lies at the intersection of health law, regulation, bioethics, and social welfare, with particular focus on the governance of emerging medical technologies, access to safe yet innovative healthcare, and civil rights and liabilities in the modern welfare state.
Background and approach
Rudge trained in law and the humanities from the outset, taking concurrent Arts and Law degrees as an undergraduate before completing a PhD (conferred 2015) on the social history and literature of medicine, developing a theory of authorship grounded in a molecular, microbial model of the posthuman subject and a reading of psychosis across Huxley, Melville, and Philip K. Dick. Since 2018 his focus has shifted from the way literary and scientific texts shape social dynamics to the close analysis of legal and regulatory instruments, reading them to expose their underlying social assumptions and structural weaknesses. A single thread runs through the newer work: a concern with how responsibility is diffused — and accountability lost — across health and welfare systems.
Research
His scholarship divides into two principal programs. The first is the regulation of therapeutic goods and emerging biomedical technologies: stem cell and cellular therapies, extracellular vesicles, genome editing, embryo and stem-cell-based embryo-model research, xenotransplantation, mitochondrial donation, psychedelics, and cosmetic injectables. Across this work — much of it in the Journal of Law and Medicine, Australian Health Review, and Melbourne University Law Review, and in collections from Cambridge and Springer — he develops a sustained critique of risk-based regulation, arguing that innovative medicines slip between regulatory gaps by design. The second program is welfare and social security law. His signature article, ‘Convict and Forget? The Failure to Remediate 15,000 Wrongful Criminal Convictions in Social Security‘ (2025) 48(2) UNSWLJ 502, examines unlawful income apportionment and its criminal-justice fallout; it drew a ministerial response and was cited in the Senate and in reports of the Australian Human Rights Commission.
Postdoctoral training
Rudge’s postdoctoral training paired law with biomedical science. He was the research associate on the Australian Research Council Linkage project ‘Regulating Autologous Stem Cell Therapies in Australia’ (LP150100739), based from 2018 to 2020 with Professor Megan Munsie in the Wells laboratory at the University of Melbourne. Led from the University of Sydney with partners at Melbourne and the National University of Singapore, the project generated the empirical and legal evidence that informed the Therapeutic Goods Administration’s reform of the regulation of autologous stem cell therapies. In 2021 he took up a second fellowship at the Centre for Law and Genetics, University of Tasmania, under Distinguished Professor Dianne Nicol — one of very few scholars trained both as a scientist and as an academic lawyer, and then Chair of the NHMRC Embryo Research Licensing Committee — researching the regulation of genome-based technologies, including editing techniques that alter DNA in germline and somatic cells. The fellowship formed part of an MRFF-funded project, ‘Genome Editing: Formulating an Australian Community Response’, which — with academics from the University of Canberra’s Centre for Deliberative Democracy, including Professors John Dryzek and Simon Niemeyer — convened the world’s first citizens’ jury on genome editing. An archived project website remains viewable, and the final report was published in 2022. Earlier, across 2018, he wrote a 210-page report for the Medical Council of NSW reviewing the regulator’s public-interest powers to suspend or condition medical practitioners.
Teaching and supervision
He teaches Torts and Torts and Contracts II, along with postgraduate units in mental illness law and policy and information rights in health care, and he teaches into extramural programs with Sydney Health Ethics and Praxis Australia. He supervises honours, master’s, and doctoral candidates, several of whose projects have been published and awarded.
Research supervision
Current students
- PhD: Ms Katie Price, ‘Saving Lives at What Cost? Reconciling the Right to Life and the Right to Liberty in Mental Health Detention to Prevent Suicide’ (lead supervisor).
- PhD: Ms Laura Sefaj, ‘Do Conditions Work? Effectiveness of Supervision Imposed on the Registration of Medical Practitioners in NSW’ (associate supervisor).
Past students
- Honours: Reeve McClelland, ‘Prescribing the Proscribed: The Rescheduling of Psychedelic Drugs in Australia’ (2024; awarded High Distinction). Published in revised form as Reeve McClelland and Christopher Rudge, ‘The Medicalisation of Psychedelic Drugs in Australia: Regulatory Implications of a Novel Treatment’ (2025) 48(3) Melbourne University Law Review 733 (PDF).
- Master’s: Lucinda Lester, ‘Ground Not Meant to Be Broken: Evaluating the Validity of Continuing Detention Orders Made under High Risk Offender Legislation after Fardon, Benbrika and Garlett’ (2023; Nancy Gordon Smith Postgraduate Prize for the highest aggregate LLM examination mark). Published in revised form as Lucinda Lester, ‘Evaluating the Validity of Continuing Detention Orders after Fardon, Benbrika, Garlett and NZYQ’ (2024) 47(3) Criminal Law Journal 302 (link).
Editorial and peer-review roles
He was production editor of the Australasian Journal of American Studies from 2015 to 2025, associate editor of Current Issues in Criminal Justice, a 2025 member of the Sydney Law Review editorial board, and a regular peer reviewer for Cambridge University Press and journals across law and bioethics.
Sydney Health Law
Rudge is Deputy Director of Sydney Health Law, a specialist health-law centre within Sydney Law School. With his colleagues he maintains the Sydney Health Law blog and develops programs consistent with the Centre’s strategic plan. The Centre was founded by Professors Roger Magnusson and Cameron Stewart and is directed by Associate Professor Belinda Reeve.
Public engagement
Rudge is also an active public commentator. In 2025 he identified apparent AI-fabricated references in a $440,000 Deloitte report to the federal government — a finding reported worldwide by the Associated Press, Bloomberg, Fortune, The Guardian, and many others. He appears regularly across the ABC, the Australian Financial Review, and The Saturday Paper on IVF regulation, cosmetic injectables, welfare law, and medical practitioner conduct, and he writes often for The Conversation. He maintains the blog Cells and Statutes at rudge.tv, contributes to the Sydney Health Law blog, and co-writes the Welfare Law in Australia substack. A book with Cameron Stewart, End-of-Life Law and Regulation in Australia (LexisNexis), is forthcoming.