News Archive

UWA graduate and Victoria Legal Aid (VLA) lawyer Daniel Webb has won the 2010 Law Institute of Victoria’s (LIV) Young Lawyer of the Year Award.

Daniel, 26, joined VLA in March 2008 as an articled clerk and is now a civil lawyer in VLA’s Civil Justice Access and Equity program.

In his first year of legal practice, Daniel ran complex and significant public interest litigation, including two Charter of Human Rights and Responsibilities test cases in the Supreme Court. These cases were for highly vulnerable clients, public housing tenants threatened with eviction and therefore facing homelessness. The cases raised significant questions about one's right to a home.

Before joining VLA, Daniel volunteered at the Cambodian Centre for Human Rights in Phnom Penh, Transparency International in Port Moresby and the Cape York Land Council in Cairns.

'Daniel's voluntary work pre-VLA shows his long-standing commitment to human rights,' said co-director of the Civil Justice Access and Equity program Joel Townsend.

'Despite his relative youth, Daniel has been an outstanding leader in various ways in the civil law practice. His history shows he knows how to connect lofty principles of human rights with the realities of especially vulnerable clients.

'He has a strong sense of engaging the intellectual challenge of law and its potential to impact on the lives of ordinary people.'

In October this year he took leave to take up a 12 month Lawyers Beyond Borders/Australian Volunteers International role as the Peoples’ Lawyer in Kiribati, a Pacific coral atoll with a population of 100,000.