Professor Ben White

Ben White graduated with first class Honours and a University Medal in Law from the Queensland University of Technology. He won a Rhodes Scholarship to complete a DPhil at Oxford University, where his doctoral thesis investigated the role that consultation plays in the law reform process.

Before joining the Law School, he worked as an associate at the Supreme Court and at Legal Aid Queensland. Between 2005 and 2007, Ben was appointed as the full-time Commissioner of the Queensland Law Reform Commission where he had carriage of the Guardianship Review on behalf of the Commission. He also served as a part-time Commissioner between 2007 and 2010.

Ben is a Director of QUT’s Health Law Research Centre. He has published extensively in the area of health law, with a particular focus on end of life decision-making and guardianship law. He is presently undertaking three ARC funded studies examining law at the end of life.

Ben teaches health law at undergraduate and postgraduate level and also supervises a number of PhD students in this area. He is currently a committee member of the Australasian Association of Bioethics and Health Law.

More information about Ben’s research is available here: http://eprints.qut.edu.au/view/person/White,_Benjamin.html.

Research interests

• End of life decision-making
• Withholding and withdrawing life-sustaining medical treatment
• Medical futility
• Euthanasia
• Palliative care
• Adult guardianship
• Health law
• Medical law
• Consent to medical treatment
• Socio-legal research into medical decision-making
• Law reform

External competitive grants

• Ben White, Lindy Willmott, Colleen Cartwright, Malcolm Parker and Gail Williams, ‘Withholding and withdrawing life-sustaining medical treatment from adults who lack capacity: The role of law in medical practice’, 2009–2012, ARC Linkage Project
• Lindy Willmott, Ben White, Cindy Gallois, Malcolm Parker, Nick Graves and Sarah Winch, ‘Futile treatment at the end of life: legal, policy, sociological and economic perspectives’, 2012-2014, ARC Linkage Project
• Cheryl Tilse, Jill Wilson, Ben White and Linda Rosenman, ‘Families and generational asset transfers: making and challenging wills in contemporary Australia’, 2011–2014, ARC Linkage Project
• Cheryl Tilse, Jill Wilson, Anne-Louise McCawley, Ben White and Lindy Willmott, ‘Enduring documents – improving the forms, improving the outcomes’, 2009–2010, Legal Practitioner Interest on Trust Accounts Funds Grant Fund
• Lindy Willmott and Ben White, ‘Improving service provision by legal practitioners to clients in relation to enduring powers of attorney and advance health directives’, 2005–2006, Legal Practitioner Interest on Trust Accounts Funds Grant Fund