Tuesday 5th February

Professor Ian Cram, University of Leeds, UK

Topic: 'The Right to Speak Offensively? Some thoughts on the Danish cartoons and freedom of expression'

The publication in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten of cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammed in 2005 (and their subsequent re-publication in media outlets across Europe ) provoked a series of protests from outraged Muslims. One of the cartoons depicted the Prophet wearing a turban in the shape of a bomb. Another image had the Prophet informing a suicide bomber that Paradise has run out of virgins. In this paper, I am interested in looking at how the European Convention on Human Rights regulates the boundary between protected and unprotected expression in the context of offensive expression. I will also look at some broader jurisprudential arguments concerning the link between offensive expression, autonomy and informed self government. If, as I argue, current European Court of Human Rights thinking is too ready to uphold national authorities' limits on religiously offensive expression, what limits, if any, ought liberal democracies place on the speech that causes hurt to religious feeling.

Thursday 7th February

Professor Michele Vellano, University of Valle d'Aosta (Italy)

Topic: The Reform Treaty of European Union

In the light of the outcome of the 2000 IGC which resulted in the Nice Treaty, the European Council decided at the end of 2001 to organise a Convention to look at how the Union could be made more democratic, transparent and efficient. This Convention, which met between March 2002 and July 2003, drew up a Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe which was intended to replace the existing treaties. It was subsequently submitted to an IGC and was agreed, slightly amended, in June 2004, and signed in October the same year.

The problems encountered in 2005 during the process of ratifying the Constitutional Treaty led the Union to engage in a process of reflection on future reform. This resulted in June 2006 in an invitation from the European Council to the future German Presidency to prepare a report on the way forward.

This report, together with the work undertaken by the German Presidency, allowed the European Council at its meeting on 21-22 June 2007 to agree on the convening of an IGC in order to draw up a "Reform Treaty" amending the existing treaties with a view to enhancing the efficiency and democratic legitimacy of the enlarged Union, as well as the coherence of its external action. The IGC is now carrying out its work in accordance with the mandate of the European Council and the new Treaty will be ready at the beginning of 2008 with several innovations.

Thursday 28th February

Professor Iain Ramsay, Kent Law School, University of Kent

Topic: The Many Futures of Consumer law and Policy

Fundamental reviews of consumer law and policy are taking place in several countries (eg UK, Australia and Japan) and the EU is also examining the future of consumer law.  This seminar will consider the themes, values and influences underlying these developments from a regulatory perspective. These include the turn to "governance" and alternatives to classic regulation, the role of the consumer as a responsibilized citizen-consumer, and the relationship of these developments to neo-liberalism and the new regulatory state.

[NB To assist in kicking off broader discussion, Luke Nottage may add some comments based on his recent 2^nd Submission to the Productivity Commission's pending Inquiry into Australia's Consumer Policy Framework.]

Monday 10th March

Professor Robert McCorquodale, British Institute of International and Comparative Law

Topic: State responsibility for Corporations violating human rights overseas

The actions by AWB and by military contractors in Iraq show that transnational corporations can violate human rights. This paper will explore the extent to which these extraterritorial activities by TNCs can give rise to international state responsibility of their home state. States routinely provide support and assistance to their corporate nationals in their global trade and investment ventures. In such circumstances states may, by their actions or omissions, facilitate and contribute to a situation in which such violations by a corporation occur, and so incur international responsibility.

Thursday 13th March

Mr William Domnarksi, Attorney at Law, California

Topic: Individual and Institutional Voices: Judicial Opinions in Australia and the United States

For all the substantive law that Australia and the United States share, the court systems in the respective countries have taken strikingly different approaches to the essence of the judicial function, the judicial opinion. The contrasting approaches have implications for law students and practitioners, for judges, and for the role of the courts themselves.

Thursday 20th March

Professor Susan Franck, University of Nebraska at Lincoln - College of Law

Topic: International Law and Empiricism: Reality Testing Claims About International Investment Disputes

With the blossoming of empirical legal scholarship and inter-disciplinary collaborations, there is an increased appreciation for the insights that empiricism offers to the legal academy.  International lawyers have likewise begun to re-discover the value empirical methodologies can add to our understanding of international law. One salient area that can benefit from empirical enquiry is the resolution of disputes from investment treaties, which affects international relations, implicates international legality of domestic government conduct, and puts millions of taxpayer dollars at risk. One need only look to statements made by the President of Bolivia in support of its withdrawal from the World Bank's International Centre for the Settlement of Investment Disputes, which quantitative data flatly contradicts, to understand the potential value of empiricism.

While suggesting there has been a "litigation explosion", commentators make untested assertions about investment treaty disputes. As the first research that explains its methodology and results, this presentation is a modest attempt to evaluate claims about investment treaty arbitration. Subjecting investment treaty arbitration to empirical scrutiny provides information that sets the stage for future research to provide insights to government officials responsible for negotiating investment treaties and parties planning their dispute resolution strategies. Ultimately, it offers factual information - grounded in a valid and reliable process - that stakeholders and commentators can use to promote dialogue about and evaluate the legitimacy of a dispute resolution process with profound public implications.

Thursday 27th March

Dr Jesse Elvin, City University, London

Topic: Causation and Responsibility: 'Take your victim as you find him?'

The legal maxim 'take your victim as you find him' is well-known in both criminal law and tort law. However, what are its limits? When can the defendant argue that unreasonable conduct by the victim broke the chain of causation? In R v Roberts (1972) 56 Cr App R 95, the England and Wales Court of Appeal suggested that 'daft' or unforeseeable reactions to the defendant's conduct should break the chain of causation. However, in R v Blaue [1975] 1 WLR 1411, the same court implied that it was irrelevant whether the victim's reaction was reasonably foreseeable, and held that 'it does not lie in the mouth of the assailant to say that his victim's religious beliefs which inhibited him from accepting certain kinds of treatment were unreasonable'. Is it possible to reconcile these two apparently contradictory authorities? What exactly are the rules pertaining to causation here? Does tort law take a different approach to causation to criminal law in this respect? If so, why is this is so, given the fact that the issue in both areas of the law is whether the defendant should be held responsible for injuries suffered by the victim?

Thursday 3rd April

Professor Ian Dennis, University College London, Faculty of Law

Topic: "Taking Human Rights Seriously: Judicial Activism and the law of criminal evidence in England"

The Human Rights Act 1998 (UK) incorporated the European Convention of Human Rights into English law. The law of criminal evidence has provided a key testing-ground for the duties imposed on the courts to give effect to Convention rights, particularly the right to a fair trial under Article 6. Experience shows the judges adopting a balanced yet critical approach to both Strasbourg jurisprudence and Westminster legislation, but the exercise of the interpretative power under section 3 of the Human Rights Act to 'read down' legislation has raised questions about the courts' relationship with Parliament and constitutional competences. It will be argued that judicial activism in this area is defensible in principle under the Human Rights Act framework, and that it has enabled the judges to develop a distinctive conception of fairness in criminal process. This conception relates the law of procedure and evidence internally to the aims of the substantive criminal law and of punishment.  The development, and the debates  it has generated, may have important implications for the introduction of human rights legislation in Australia.

Monday 7th April

Zoe Hamilton, Commissioning Editor, Cambridge University Press

Topic: Publishing with Cambridge University Press

An informal discussion about publishing law books with Cambridge University Press. Topics covered will include the shape of the Cambridge law list (what the editor's looking for), preparing a proposal, review processes (quality assurance) and Cambridge Australia's relationship with overseas branches (publishing for global distribution). There will be plenty of time for questions and discussion in the group forum, but Zoe will also be available between 10 am and 12 pm, and 2.30 pm and 5 pm to discuss specific projects or ideas and issues. If you would like to speak with her privately, please email her at zhamilton@cambridge.edu.au, or phone on (03) 8671 1480 to set up an appointment.

Thursday 17th April

Dr Kevin Walton, Faculty of Law, University of Sydney

Topic: What is Civil Disobedience?

According to John Rawls, civil disobedience is 'a public, non-violent, conscientious yet political act contrary to law usually done with the aim of bringing about a change in the law or policies of the government.' In this paper, I argue against his influential definition by locating a moralistic and inadequate conception of politics at its core to which I offer an alternative.

Thursday 24th April

Mr Nicholas Haskins, Program Officer (International Networks), Office of the Deputy Vice-Chancellor (International), University of Sydney

Associate Professor Robyn McConchie, Director, Research Institute for Asia and the Pacific, University of Sydney

Ms Janice Mountford, Research Support Officer, Faculty of Law

Topic: International Funding Opportunities

This seminar will focus on the international funding opportunities that exist for researchers and the University and Faculty support available.

Thursday 1st May

Dr Ben Saul, Faculty of Law, University of Sydney

Topic: Smelling Terror - And Making Crime Not War: Defining Terrorism in International Law

Thursday 8th May

Professor Katherine Stone, UCLA Law School

Topic: The Missing Link in the Labour-Trade Debates — The Case of Japan

This paper is part of a larger project that looks at the ways in which several developed countries are rewriting their labour laws in response to changes in the nature of work. I am focusing on Japan, Australia, and several countries in Europe because has had a very distinctive system of legal regulation, and one that differs markedly from that of the United States. Each country's regulatory system is facing similar pressures from globalisation and new technologies, but each one is responding in its own distinctive way, as informed by its own distinctive history, culture, norms, and pre-existing legal system. This paper focuses on recent changes in Japanese employment relations and on the very recent developments in Japanese labour and employment laws. I call this paper The Missing Link because until now, the trade-labour debates have debated whether there is a race to the bottom or a race to the top, but have not focused on firm-level work practices and the regulatory frameworks in which firms operate. I hope that my study will not only illuminate common trends and intractable differences, but will also suggest policy measures to balance security and stability with flexibility that can be transposed to other countries and hence create new forms of livelihood security and a new social safety net in the face of the quickly proliferating new work practices. At the end, I will present several theoretical perspectives on the global trends that are fueling the changes in regulatory regimes, and suggest the implications for domestic-level social reform.

Thursday 22nd May

Professor Patrick Parkinson, Faculty of Law, University of Sydney

Topic: Workshop on Publishers' contracts

Friday 23rd May

Mr Raj Panjwani, Legal Counsel, India

Topic: Animal Law, An Indian Perspective

India is a nation that is largely committed to the principle of ahimsa or "non-violence". It is also one of the few countries in the world that has enshrined animal protection in its Constitution. Despite this, animals in India continue to suffer enormously and in staggering numbers.  This seminar will provide an overview of the status of animal protection in India and shed light on some of the big issues facing legal advocates for animals. Drawing on more than twenty-five years of experience and his work as Legal Counsel for India's peak environmental and animal protection organisations, the author will discuss his first-hand experience as a voice for wild and domesticated animals used in entertainment, food production, scientific and teaching purposes and hunting. He will also examine the implications of the global expansion of agribusiness for India's farm animals.

The aim of the seminar is to provide an in-depth account of the status of the animal law movement in India, its achievements and the challenges that lie ahead. The talk will also demonstrate that animal law crosses jurisdictional boundaries and that Australian animal lawyers have much to learn from their international colleagues

Monday 26th May

Professor Kirsten Anker, McGill University

Topic: Coyote and Raven: Teaching Indigenous Jurisprudence in McGill's Transystemic Legal Education Program

At the end of a research project on the recognition of Indigenous traditional law as native title – in which I had been frustrated by the impoverished conceptualisation of this recognition as merely an historical "intersection of two normative orders" or in terms of Indigenous law as social fact – I realised that one way to take seriously the existence of Indigenous law AS law in Australia would be to include it in the law school curriculum.

Apart from one or two exceptions, this is not the way "Indigenous issues" are usually framed in legal education, where courses on "Indigenous Legal Studies" or "Aboriginal Peoples and the Law" tend to consider those areas of common law and statute that explicitly deal with Indigenous peoples or impact them in distinct ways – native title, heritage legislation, criminal law and imprisonment, adoption and marriage, the removal of children and so on. In many cases, critical perspectives on these matters do necessarily draw on understandings of Indigenous law – for example, when the "holistic" nature of traditional relations to country are contrast to the common law concept of property as a "bundle of rights" that has characterized native title. In other cases, traditional law forms part of the factual matrix taken into account by courts, such as when women's secret business became a key issue in an application for preventing land development, or when traditional arrangements concerning "promised wives" were used to justify lenient sentencing in a rape case. Mostly, however, these courses are not explicitly premised on learning (about) Indigenous law as such.  It is the purpose of the paper that will be presented to discuss some possibilities for doing so, and raise some potential limitations, based on my experiences at McGill University Faculty of Law.

When I arrived at McGill in 2004, I saw that their "transsystemic legal education" program offered a different way of thinking about the inclusion of Indigenous law in the curriculum. Like law faculties in other "mixed" jurisdictions such as Puerto Rico, Louisiana and Scotland, McGill has for many years offered a syllabus that consciously identifies distinct legal traditions behind the common law and civil law elements that make up the "law in force" in Quebec. For the last decade, however, the teaching of law "across traditions" at McGill has developed into a distinct philosophy of legal education – informally known as "transsystemia" – that has broader implications for the way we think about law, and for the inclusion of other legal traditions. Rather than teach the common and civil law systems in parallel but isolated streams, the McGill approach is to teach them both in the same course. At the narrow end this produces a comparative methodology – one which necessitates thinking beyond "rules" to culture, place and time in order to explain existent differences.  More generally, though, it aspires to a "sustained dialog with otherness," to quote former Dean Yves-Marie Morissette. Further, such an educational program aims to produce students who themselves are acculturated to two legal traditions, who move constantly between them and so themselves represent a métissage of legal knowledges.

The transsystemic philosophy of legal education thus stresses law as an intellectual process and cultural tradition that is not restricted by the territorial concerns of sovereignty and the "law in force." Courses are also taught in Talmudic and Islamic law, for example. In Canada, however, the legal traditions of First Nations and Inuit peoples have a special claim to inclusion. This paper will outline how the course "Aboriginal Peoples and the Law" has tried to bring Indigenous law into the curriculum in a more robust way than had previously been attempted at McGill. Some particular challenges are raised in this attempt because the familiar law school language of rules, principles, dispute resolution and so on may not be adequate for an understanding of Indigenous law, and further, the university context itself – the class room model, its instructional techniques, the reliance on texts – may tend to objectify Indigenous law and render it as "information" and fact rather than help students understand the distinctive qualities of oral traditions and their ritual and sacred aspects. Relying on guest teachers and "field trips" helped address my own lack of expertise as a non-Indigenous instructor, but issues of context remained. In short, the problem is to what extent, and in what ways, can "outsiders" learn about the law of a people?

Despite entrenched difficulties in translation and the ethical issues that they entail, a broader audience for Indigenous law has been encouraged in Canada, most notably by Anishinabek scholar John Borrows.  I will consider the paths already broken by Law Faculties, such as those at the University of Victoria where Borrows teaches and at the University of Ottawa, which have made radical pedagogical changes concerning Indigenous legal traditions, but argue that the transsystemic approach offers something different in its movement "across" and "between" traditions. What this movement produces I have begun to think of as the presence of a trickster – Coyote and Raven – in the classroom, those powerful but fallible beings that, as one of my mentors explains to me, can throw a spanner in the works, and in the process, teach us not to take ourselves too seriously. In part, it is making the foibles of the acts of translation themselves an explicit focus of a transsystemic course that allows us to understand ourselves better and thus to work towards making space for Indigenous law.

Thursday 29th May

Dr Paul Johnson, University of Surrey

Topic: Law, Morality and Sexuality

The Sexual Offences Act 2003 was seen as a fundamental milestone in English law with regard to homosexuality. It was significant for repealing all specific male homosexual offences. Yet the Act also introduced a new statutory offence of 'sexual activity in a public lavatory' which was formulated and enacted on the basis of concerns about male homosexual public sexual activity. This seminar will examine the justifications for, and implications of, this legislation as a way of considering a range of broader questions around the continuing legal regulation of male homosexuality. It will consider the main arguments made in support of the offence and situate these within established moral, legal, and social debates about homosexuality. The seminar will address the relationship between conceptions of public and private morality in relation to the legal regulation of homosexual sex and explore the complex nature of regulating public sex in relation to sexual practices which often maintain high degrees of privacy. The seminar will also address the legislation in contradiction with the realities of police work and contemporary law enforcement.

Thursday 5th June

Dr David Rolph, Faculty of Law, University of Sydney

Topic: Privacy and Photography: some preliminary thoughts

Media practices involving the intrusive use of photographs and other visual images have been a matter of ongoing public concern in both Australia and the United Kingdom. However, until recently, Anglo-Australian law has been largely ineffective in providing a remedy to those who have had their privacy invaded. This paper seeks to explore the movement towards direct privacy protection in Australia and the United Kingdom, with a particular emphasis on the position of photography. It argues that there has been a decisive shift in the way in which judges view and treat photography, its practices and its technologies. This paper, which presents work-in-progress, seeks to trace the change in judicial conceptions of and approaches to photography and to provide a critique of these conceptions and approaches, drawing upon the work of major theorists of photography.

Thursday 12th June

Dr Scott Veitch, Law School, University of Glasgow

Topic: Law's Disavowals

In an early draft of the Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith wrote that the gross iniquities produced and supported by the division of labour in society were maintained 'either by violence or by the more orderly oppression of law'. If the latter was more likely to be legitimate, and thus succeed longer-term, what was its relation to the former? The answer is to be found in law and legal institutions' intrigues with the social forms and processes within which the production of right happens in tandem with the delivery of inequalities. Moreover where this is so, complicity in injustice and suffering spreads out across social activities and disappears; and it does so according to a key mode of organisation which is the legal disaggregation of personal and group responsibility for harms caused and suffered. In this paper I seek to explore and evaluate this claim through jurisprudential observation combined with contemporary examples of how law simultaneously connects and disconnects responsibility for harms.

Thursday 26th June

Professor Makoto Ibusuki, Ritsumeikan University Law School, Kyoto

Topic: Current Fashion in the Japanese Criminal Justice System: Populism, Judicial Reform and the Future

This speech focuses on the recent Japanese criminal justice reform and penal populism in Japan.

In 2001, the Japanese Judicial Reform committee published its final recommendations which includes introduction of mixed jury system in criminal trial (2009- ). The recommendation also includes establishment of the new law school as educational facility in the graduate level (2004- ), launching of Intellectual Property High Court (2005- ) and innovation of total design for legal aid. This reform was the largest in terms of scale since the Second World War.

In the new century, the Japanese parliament has passed several types of bills which are intended to provide right of victims. One of the bills was to introduce victims' right to question against the defendant in the trial and to establish victims' right to express their opinion on the sentencing. The parliament has also revised the Juvenile Law for introducing victims' appearance/sitting in the juvenile trials and prosecutors' involvement into the juvenile trial. The diet also changed the maximum sentencing of specific crimes in the penal law although crime rate in Japan, especially for serious crime such as murder and rape, is relatively low among the developed countries.

The speaker will analyze the background of these two movements above and will also introduce the Japanese characteristics of victim-driven policy making. Finally, it will be pointed out that the simultaneous occurrence of these streams is giving enormous influence on Japanese criminal justice system, and changing the traditional and moderate (not harsh) features of the Japanese penal system dramatically.

Thursday 10th July

Professor Allan Hutchinson, Osgood Hall Law School, York University, Toronto

Topic: The Provinciality of Jurisprudence Determined

The paper for this seminar is available here.

This chapter forms part of a book, titled The Province of Jurisprudence Democratised, which offers a root-and-branch critique of analytical jurisprudence. The basic thesis is that jurisprudence was taken down a blind alley by John Austin and has not yet managed to secure a way out. In this chapter, I target conceptual analysis and argue that, despite its trumpeted claims to the contrary, it is not neutral between different political systems of governance. Put bluntly, its account of law might easily capture the operation of authoritarian regimes and some industrialised modern states (e.g., the United Kingdom and the United States), but it fails to accommodate other kinds of governmental arrangements. In particular, it does not lend itself to applying to strongly democratic modes of governance and, on occasion, places considerable obstacles in the way of their development. Divested of its universalistic claims, analytical jurisprudence becomes exactly the kind of politicised theory which it claims to reject and from which it strives to distinguish itself.

Thursday 24th July

Mr Steven Truxal, University of Westminster

Topic: TBA

Thursday 7th August

Dr Fiona Burns, Faculty of Law, University of Sydney

Topic: The Future of Intestacy Reform in NSW: The Uniform Succession Laws Intestacy Report

As part of the Uniform Succession Laws Project, the New South Wales Law Reform Commission published the Uniform Succession Laws: Intestacy Report in 2007 (Report 116). If implemented, the Report (and its associated legislation) will significantly change the law of intestacy in Australia. This seminar paper considers some of the major recommendations of the Report, taking the opportunity to compare and contrast the recommendations with the present features of intestacy law in Australia (with particular emphasis on NSW).

Thursday 14th August

Professor George Smith, Faculty of Law, Catholic University of America

Topic: Toward a Universal Right to Health, Health Care or Health Protection?

Codifying, and then implementing, an international right to health, health care, or protection is beset with serious roadblocks–foremost among them being contentious issues of indeterminacy, justiciability, and progressive realization.

Although advanced–and to some degree recognized under the rubric of a social or cultural entitlement within the law of human rights and, more particularly, the U.S. Declaration on Human Rights, together with International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the European Convention on Human Rights, and presently UNESCO's Draft Declaration on Universal Norms on Bioethics–attainment of such a universal right to health remains at best dubious.

The central impediment to the recognition of such a right is determining the extent to which a sustained level of economic stability must be charted before a state can be seen as either recognizing or enforcing a right to health of any kind and at any level of magnitude. Indeed, under the ICESCR, realization of economic social and cultural rights is to be effected only under a standard of progressivity. In other words, so long a states move "progressively" toward the realization of these rights, no actionable violations will be sustained. This, then, results in a flawed enforcement mechanism which allows any state signatory to this foundational covenant to pace enforcement of the rights under the ICESCR according to national standards of political will and differing levels of economic development and sustainability. Economic self-interest–not transnational principles and lofty aspirational goals–will determine ultimately, the extent to which health care protections are recognized as a integral part of social, cultural, political, or human rights.

Thursday 21st August

Ms Eloise Scotford, Corpus Christi College, Faculty of Law, University of Oxford

Topic: Current issues in environmental law in Europe

Thursday 4th September

Professor Horst Dippel, University of Kasse

Topic: TBA

Thursday 11th September

Dr Grant Lamond, Balliol College, University of Oxford

Topic: Coercion

Coercion is a central issue within the law. There are a range of types of coercion, ranging from the actual use of physical force to the threat of some unwelcome consequence, and there are a variety of ways in which coercion matters to the law—such as relieving the coerced from liability (e.g., duress in contract) and rendering the coercer liable (e.g., inducing breach of contract). There is also an abiding question about how crucial coercion is to the nature of law. Underpinning these issues is the question of the boundaries of coercion, and why coercion is thought to have the normative significance that it does.

Thursday 25th September

Professor Reg Graycar, Faculty of Law, University of Sydney

Topic: TBA

Thursday 9th October

Associate Professor Helen Irving

Topic: TBA

Thursday 16th October

Professor Alexander Graser

Topic: TBA