Kate Offer

Kate Offer is a legal academic and Senior Lecturer with UWA’s Law School. Her academic interests lie in the intersection of law and technology. Ms Offer is a UWA alumna and, after graduation, practised law for five years, three of which she spent doing defence work in the Children’s Court.

Highly commended for her teaching and a recipient of multiple awards, she found a passion for teaching law when she took on a casual role at UWA in 1996. Her current work includes developing the curriculum for a new elective unit, Adulting: Law for Everyday Lives. The unit will provide an introduction to the practical legal issues that can arise in a young person’s life.

In January 2017 she was appointed the inaugural Director of Disruption in the Law School, which facilitates the unit, Legal APPtitude. The unit allows student to work with not-for-profit organisations to build an app that solves a legal issue. As Director, she engages and leads in the law and technology space. Her role considers how technology is changing legal practice and how it can be used to teach more effectively, enabling graduates to be better prepared for the legal profession.

Ms Offer is also working on the Student Engagement Survey, an extensive empirical study which will seek to measure attendance across the units taught by the Law School and develop pedagogical strategies for enhancing student learning and engagement.

She is the co-author of Western Australian Evidence Law and recently co-authored the article ‘“You must be joking”: the role of humour in the law classroom’ in the international journal, The Law Teacher. This article was one of the 10 most downloaded articles of the journal in 2017.

Qualifications:

• BA, UWA
• LLB, UWA
• LLM, UWA

External positions:

• Board Member, Teachers Registration Board
• Chair, Teachers Registration Board Disciplinary Committees