Remembering Emeritus Professor David Brown

Emeritus Professor David Brown

11 September 1948 – 1 February 2026

When Neil Mercer was writing his book, The Kingpin and the Crooked Cop (2024) about two notorious criminals, Neddy Smith and police officer Roger Rogerson, he ran into a dead-end. He was trying to unearth and verify one of the lesser-known stories of Rogerson’s misdeeds – the truth about the fatal shooting of Philip Western in 1976. One of his journalist friends said, ‘You have to talk to David Brown’.

And so he did.

David Brown drew on his extensive knowledge of NSW police corruption and police-perpetrated violence since the 1970s, and steered Mercer in the direction of a largely forgotten inquiry conducted by the NSW Public Service Board, and towards a transcript held in the State Archives. David also suggested that Mercer consult stories from 1976 in the socialist newspaper, Militant. Mercer pursued both leads and before long the full truth was in front of him.

This wasn’t a one-off. David Brown spent most of his life working to expose the truth about criminal justice institutions. Five decades before guiding Mercer towards the truth about the killing of Philip Western, David Brown was a key player in the Prisoners Action Group, a small group of prisoners, ex-prisoners and academics, whose activism and agitation played a major role in bringing into the spotlight the institutionalised brutality that was endemic in NSW prisons at the time, leading to the establishment of the Nagle Royal Commission into NSW Prisons, which released its landmark report in 1978.

David put his book smarts and expertise to work exposing police and prison corruption and violence, and fighting the criminal justice system’s perpetuation of racialised and class-based disadvantage. Fan of rugby league that he was – including in the feisty days of the 1980s – David’s version of the ‘fight’ was a non-violent one. It was a marriage of intellect, unwavering political commitment and fearless activism. It manifested in his prodigious and influential scholarship. The Prison Struggle: Changing Australia's Penal System (1982), co-authored with George Zdenkowski, was an early example. It shaped how he taught courses in Criminal Law, Advanced Criminal Law, Criminal Justice, Crime Prevention, Community Corrections and Penology. It was evident in the enthusiasm with which he worked with individuals and organisations outside universities and the legal system.

David Brown’s version of academic activism ran much deeper than a little organising, advocacy or lobbying ‘on the side’ of a day job concerned with teaching aspiring lawyers about the criminal law. David’s ethos was a simple one: what matters is not what we do for ourselves but what we do for each other and what we do together.

In Rethinking Law and Order (1998), Brown and his friend and collaborator of more than 50 years, Russell Hogg, skewered the regressive hold that ‘law and order common sense’ had on state politics and revealed how the punitive path to crime prevention was doomed to fail – meanwhile inflicting much social harm. Pushing against the tide, David and Russell made a compelling case for an approach to crime control and public safety based on associative democracy.

The Prison Struggle and Rethinking Law and Order remain classics of a style of criminological scholarship that refused to stay in conventional academic and disciplinary lanes. This approach was rendered all the more influential by being situated at the intersection of global intellectual ideas and local reform activism.  Another exemplar was the Alternative Criminology Journal, which David founded, and which traversed the worlds of academic criminology and prison and criminal justice activism. This journal was the catalyst for the development of critical criminology in Australia which today – measured in numbers of academics, volume and academic programs and curricula and visibility in research and theory – has become mainstream. This distinctively Australian critical tradition owes a great deal to David Brown. A core tenet is that theory and research must remain closely connected to, and informed by, the daily realities of injustice and inequity in the administration of justice, and agitation and campaigns for reform.

That David Brown changed the face of socio-legal and criminological scholarship in Australia is all the more remarkable given that he used to describe himself as an ‘accidental academic’.

Born in India, raised and educated in New Zealand, David had a brief period in legal practice in Auckland in the early 1970s. An early triumph was securing bail for a group of Hare Krishnas, who had picked some flowers from a private garden to adorn themselves as they prepared for a morning of dancing and singing through the city streets – only to be arrested and charged with stealing. David raised the rarely used defence of ‘necessity’, arguing that the Hare Krishnas had no choice – it being early in the morning and the shops were not yet open for the day. A career in criminal defence work beckoned.

But David had bigger horizons, and made the trip to Cambridge to pursue postgraduate studies in criminology. Towards the end of his time there, and keen to spend some time back in New Zealand, serendipity offered him a job as a lecturer at the recently established law school at the University of NSW in Sydney. It wasn’t exactly the destination he had in mind, but his new employer would pay the airfare, and it would bring him within striking distance of Auckland. He arrived in Sydney in 1974. That city was to be his home for the next 52 years. In recent years, he also enjoyed time on the NSW south coast where he could fulfil a dream of living by the ocean.

The fit with the fledgling UNSW law school was a good one. David embraced the progressive, activist vision of legal education that had been set by foundation dean Hal Wootten. He steadfastly defended this vision for decades – whenever the uncompromising pursuit of the law school’s social justice mission was under threat.

He was instrumental in conceiving a new approach to the teaching of criminal law. Almost anyone who has studied law in NSW during the last 35 years will have become acquainted with the criminal law textbook affectionately known as the ‘Four Davids’. The moniker was attributable to the fact by some quirk of the universe, four men named David were teaching criminal law at UNSW in the 1980s – David Brown, David Farrier, David Neal and David Weisbrot. The book’s cute nick-name belied just how much it challenged the status quo – not only with political conviction, but with deep appreciation of the insights to be gained from a range of social science and humanities perspectives, and a determination to locate the study of criminal law in its daily practices – with a spotlight on the injustices that it produced.

First published in 1990, the book revolutionised how the topic of criminal law was conceived and taught. Many thousands of graduates of universities in the state of NSW are better lawyers, criminologists, community activists, public servants, judges and politicians because of the justice-oriented criminal law curriculum that the book enabled. In the 8^th edition of Criminal Laws, published in 2025, David Brown was still at the helm, assisted by an enthusiastic team of 10 ‘honorary Davids’ – eight women and two men.

The reputation that the UNSW Faculty of Law and Justice continues to enjoy today for excellence in criminal law and criminology scholarship, teaching and social justice reform is attributable, in no small part, to the work of David Brown. When he retired in 2008, he was honoured with the title of Emeritus Professor, in recognition of the enormous contribution he had made to the university, to his disciplines and to social justice. In 2010 he was awarded a Doctor of Laws degree by his alma mater, the University of Auckland.

Beyond his formal teaching responsibilities, scholarship and activism, David was a nurturer of careers and lives in the most unassuming way. He almost certainly never uttered the phrase ‘5 year plan’, and would probably have run a mile from an officially sanctioned mentoring program, but through gentle conversations, suggestions and encouragement, and by his example, he guided many an uncertain young law graduate – and quite a few older ones too.

A collectivist to his core, David had always been the consummate project team member. After he officially ‘retired’ – in the way that many academics do: stopping teaching and attending meetings (and getting paid) but remaining as active a researcher as ever – he excelled in this capacity. And retirement did not slow down his commitment to research and scholarship that exposed the harms done by institutions of criminal justice administration, and which made the case for reform. Between 2008 and 2025 David was prolific, co-authoring four important books: Penal Culture and Hyperincarceration: The Revival of the Prison (2013); Justice Reinvestment: Winding Back Imprisonment (2016); Youth Justice and Penality in Comparative Context (2020); and Rethinking Community Sanctions: Social Justice and Penal Control (2023). At the time of his death he was contributing his enormous expertise and experience to an Australian Research Council funded study of why governments continue to turn to the criminal law – and to punishment – to ‘solve’ complex risks and harms, even in the face of past failures.

Although he was powerful activist scholar, capable of trenchant criticism of the actions (and inactions) of government, David was also highly respected within government circles for his expertise, advocacy and persuasiveness. The unique regard in which he was held was illustrated by his appointment as a NSW Law Reform Commissioner, where he made valuable contributions to the Commission’s influential report on bail reform (2012), a report that made the case for wider availability of bail and a reduced remand population in NSW prisons. When, within months, the Government buckled, and began to undo these progressive reforms, David Brown again picked up the tools of the activist academic. With Julia Quilter, he penned a biting critique of the government’s capitulation, published in the International Journal of Crime, Justice and Social Democracy.   

David found the love of his life later than some. He was a devoted partner and later husband, of Janice Gray for close to three decades. He lived up to his promise that he would be ‘good for her’. As they both pursued their academic careers, they shared a life of raising children, hosting gourmet lunches and dinners for their friends, reading novels, attending the theatre, and travelling the world together. They were truly a team.

When news of David’s death spread around the world, and the tributes started rolling in, there was a remarkable similarity to the way in which the biggest names in criminal law and criminology described him. In the words of one such correspondent: ‘a brilliant scholar, with an enormously generous intellect, and a wonderful man.’ Such descriptions speak to David’s unique combination of attributes. Alongside his political commitments and his warmth, he was a sophisticated theoretician. The knowledge drawn from reading across multiple disciplines – not only law and criminology, but also sociology, politics, philosophy and history – informed his analysis of the ‘criminal justice system’.

For a person who was avowedly anti-establishment in so many ways, one might imagine that David would sneer at social conventions and expectations. That would be a mistake. While he was courageous in testing and pushing the bounds of the acceptable in scholarly research, he adhered to the view that civility was an undervalued virtue, to be observed when you disagreed as much as when you agreed with other people.

As a music-loving boy and teenager in New Zealand, he attempted to embrace a particular type of conformity – the hairstyles of his idols. He tried hard to train his locks into the rock’n’roll quiff of the 1950s, and later the Beatles’ haircuts of the 1960s. He was mightily relieved when African American-influenced 1970s fashion stylings arrived, and he could allow his naturally abundant, curly hair to grow long and run wild.

When a firebrand law student once sought out his favourite social justice-oriented and left-leaning law school lecturer in the hope of some shared outrage and strategising over the two train fines the student had received for fare evasion and for placing his feet on the seat, things did not play out as expected. David sympathised over the fare evasion fine, but firmly expressed the view that putting your feet on the seats of a train was inconsiderate towards fellow travellers. The student (now barrister) thereafter kept his feet firmly planted on the floor when travelling on trains.

Although the subjects of his work were almost always serious, David worked as he lived – with humour and warmth.  David was a spell-binding teller of yarns – whether his subject matter was catching eels during his childhood in New Zealand, being attacked by blue bottles during a swim at one of his favourite swimming place (Wylie’s Baths in Coogee) or the outrage of the punitive and unprincipled ‘truth in sentencing’ regime introduced by the Greiner Coalition Government in NSW in 1989. He told stories with a twinkle in his eye, a wry grin on his face, his hands moving – always drawing you in. His conversations – and his work – were infused with allusions to song, poetry, literature, designed not only to lighten the academic load and to engage, but also to illuminate: the factual and the imaginative, reason and emotion, together and intermingling.

David’s love of the ocean was immense. Amidst the grief, there is some comfort in the fact that on the late summer day that he died, he was walking his dog Bentley on the beach near his coastal home.

David Brown leaves behind his wife, Dr Janice Gray, and his stepdaughters, Isobel and Madeleine Gray. He was also stepfather to James.