Marcia Neave has enjoyed a successful and influential career as a lawyer, academic and public policy maker. She became a judge of the Court of Appeal, Supreme Court of Victoria, in 2006.

A gifted student, Neave was awarded the Melbourne Law School’s Supreme Court prize in 1965. Together with Ronald Sackville (now a judge of the Federal Court of Australia), she was responsible for writing the first Australian casebook on the law of property. Neave taught at the Melbourne Law School before moving to Adelaide to become dean of Law at the University of Adelaide. The appointment earned her the distinction of being one of the first three women in Australia to be appointed to a chair in law. 

Neave returned to Victoria in 1991 to take up a personal chair at Monash University’s Faculty of Law. She became a fellow of the Hauser Global Law Faculty at New York University Law School and of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia.

Neave served as a professor in the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University in 1995–96 and was President of the Commonwealth Administrative Review Council from 1995 to 1999. She took up the position of foundation chair of the re-established Victorian Law Reform Commission in 2000, conducting enquiries on topics including homicide, sexual offences, workplace privacy and intellectual disability. Other posts Neave has held include those of part-time Commissioner and Director of Research with the New South Wales Law Reform Commission. She headed an inquiry into prostitution for the Victorian Government in 1984–85.

Neave was appointed an Officer in the Order of Australia in 1999 in recognition of her contribution to the law, “particularly in relation to law reform in the area of social justice as it relates to issues affecting women, and to legal education”. In 2001 she was a recipient of the Centenary Medal.