Dr Anna Saunders

Dr Anna Saunders is a Lecturer at the ANU Law School. She researches in international law, the history and theory of property, and the political economy of science and technology. Her current work explores transformations of intellectual property and of legal frameworks for scientific and technological cooperation in the context of a climate-changed world.

Anna has received internal funding from ANU Law School to explore international lawmaking through science and technology agreements. In 2025, she co-convened a workshop (with Dr Wanshu Cong) on ‘International Law and Technology From Below’. The workshop brought together leading Australian and international scholars working across law, history, and sociology to explore social histories of, and present strategies for, reimagining international lawmaking for technological change. Other works-in-progress include an article on theorisations of technology in international law during the postwar period of decolonisation, and a short project mapping different strategies for the greening of patent laws across national jurisdictions.

Anna serves on the editorial board of the London Review of International Law, is Book Reviews Editor (with Dr Beatriz Kira) at the Journal of Law and Political Economy, and is a member of the governing board of the International Society for the History and Theory of Intellectual Property (ISHTIP) (2025–2030). At the ANU, she is a member of the Capitalism Studies Network and the Centre for International and Public Law. In 2025, she will be a Senior Visiting Fellow at Sciences Po Law.

Anna obtained her doctorate from University College London, where she was a Modern Law Review Scholar, a Graduate Lecturer in Property Law, and the recipient of a prestigious London Arts and Humanities Partnership studentship from the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council. She holds a JD (first class honours) and MPhil from Melbourne Law School, where she was an editor of the Melbourne Journal of International Law, and an LLM from Harvard Law School, where she was a Frank Knox Fellow.

Prior to joining academia she served as an associate to Justice Susan Kenny AM at the Federal Court of Australia, and is admitted as an Australian lawyer and an officer of the Supreme Court of Victoria.