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Profile
Dr Samuel White is the Senior Research Fellow in Peace and Security at the Centre for International Law. Dr White entered academia as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Adelaide Law School. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, an Editor of the United States Military Academy’s Articles of War and an Editor of the Adelaide Law Review.
Dr White holds titles as Visiting Fellow at the Australian Defence Force Academy (2023 – 2025) and the Army Visiting Fellow at the Australian War Memorial (2024 – 2027). In 2024, he was made an Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society for his work on cross-cultural understandings of warfare. In 2025, he was appointed a Fellow of the National Library of Australia for his research on Australian legal history. He holds positions as an Adjunct Associate Professor at the University of New England & at the University of Adelaide.
Concurrently to his academic pursuits, Samuel has served as both a Royal Australian Infantry Corps and an Australian Army Legal Corps officer in a variety of tactical, operational and strategic level postings. These include platoon command in the 9th Royal Queensland Regiment; Staff Officer in the Directorate of Operations and International Law; Deputy Command Legal Officer – Headquarters Maritime Border Command; and as a Reserve Legal Officer within Special Operations Command.
His military experiences focused his doctoral studies, which addressed the constitutional ambit and limitations of responding to foreign interference (both traditional and modern forms) via military responses. Relying upon practical and operational experience, Samuel completed his doctorate in under two years. Whist writing his PhD, he concurrently published his first monograph, Keeping the Peace of the Realm (LexisNexis, 2021), which assessed the limits on executive power in Australia’s federal construct. He is the editor of another multi-volume series, called The Laws of Yesterday’s Wars (Brill Nijhoff) which critically questions how international the laws of war are. This arose from his military service, and later work as a Senior Legal Officer in the Office of International Law, Commonwealth Attorney-General’s Department.
In 2018, he served as Associate to the Honourable Justice John Logan of the Federal Court of Australia, Supreme & National Courts of Papua New Guinea, and President of the Defence Force Discipline Appeals Tribunal. He is admitted to practice as a Solicitor in the State of Queensland and before the High Court of Australia; as well as a Barrister and Solicitor in New Zealand.
He holds a Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Laws (Hons) from the University of Queensland; a Master of Laws (Hons I) from the University of Melbourne; a Master of Law from the University of Adelaide; a Master of War Studies from the University of New South Wales; and a PhD from the University of Adelaide.
