Sydney Law School Social Justice celebration
2024-11-26 17:30 - 19:00 (Australia/Sydney) | Common Room, Level 4, New Law Building (F10), Eastern Avenue, Camperdown campus, New Law Building, Camperdown, 2006, Australia
At Sydney Law School, we think teach, research, and engage in the social justice dimensions of law. We appreciate the social context in which law operates, and law’s potential to both enable and constrain, to both liberate and oppress. This event will celebrate many of the social achievements from the year and showcase work of students, including those working on the Just Cause podcast, practitioners-in-residence, including a presentation from Liz Snell (current practitioner-in-residence), and staff.

The Kim Santow Law and Social Justice Essay Prize will also be announced at this event.

About the presenter

Liz Snell is interested in researching and better understanding the mechanisms required to ensure and support successful implementation of recommendations in inquiries with a focus on inquiries responding to gender-based violence. Liz has worked as the Law Reform and Policy Co-ordinator at Women’s Legal Service for over a decade. Women’s Legal Service is a specialist community legal centre run by and for women that aims to achieve access to justice and a just legal system for women in NSW.

Tuesday 26 November 2024, 5.30-7pm AEDT

Venue: New Law Building (F10), Level 4, Common Room, Eastern Avenue, Camperdown campus

Registration

Complimentary, however registration is essential.Register

This event is proudly supported by the Kim Santow Law and Social Justice Fund.

New directions in financial crime
2024-11-29 09:00 - 18:00 | Law Foyer, Level 2, New Law Building (F10), University of Sydney, Camperdown Campus
Financial crime is a global issue that has a significant impact on Australia’s society and economy. Related offences come in different forms (e.g. bribery, corruption, fraud, money laundering) and are committed by different actors, with various motivations. The different sectors involved range from small businesses to large banks and from the real estate to the art market. Unsurprisingly, financial crime has been the subject of significant academic study for decades, as well as being an area of national and international concern for policymakers, regulators, and law enforcement. The aim of this symposium is to bring together different experts to discuss a wide variety of contemporary issues and challenges in this context.

Speakers

AUSTRAC – TBC.

Katie Benson, University of Manchester, UK – AML Reflections from the UK.

Liz Campbell, Monash University – Legal Professional Privilege and Corporate Liability.

David Chaikin, University of Sydney – Lawyers and Tranche 2.

Jonathan Clough, Monash University – Topic TBC.

Derwent Coshott – The Risk-Based Approach (Cayman Islands developments).

Penny Crofts, University of Technology Sydney – Corporate Financial Crime and Euphemism.

Olivia Dixon, University of Sydney – AML and Lawyers.

Louis de Koker, La Trobe University – Risk and the FATF’s Risk-Based Approach.

Susanna Ford, Arnold Bloch Leibler – Foreign Bribery.

Radha Ivory, University of Queensland – Corporate Criminal Liability Reforms.

Doron Goldbarsht, Macquarie University – Personal Liability of Directors.

Hannah Harris, Macquarie University – The Forest-Finance Nexus: Addressing the Connection between Forest Crime and Financial Crime.

Anton Moiseienko, Australian National University – AML Developments.

Rachel Southworth, Bank of Queensland (provisionally confirmed).

Megan Styles, Monash University – Asset Forfeiture.

Yane Svetiev, University of Sydney – FATF MERs and Developing Countries.

Mitali Tyagi, APG – The Infrastructure of the FATF System.

View the program here

Friday 29 November, 2024

Time: 9am – 6pmVenue: Law Foyer, Level 2, New Law Building, University of Sydney

This event is proudly presented by the Sydney Institute of Criminology at the University of Sydney Law School.

Does compliance with the global anticorruption regime require the use of artificial intelligence?: The case of managing global critical raw material value chains
2025-01-21 13:00 - 14:00 | The University of Sydney Law School, Boardroom, Level 4, New Law Building F10
Hybrid event

Business firms constantly hear that artificial intelligence has changed the world and that they must either utilize artificial intelligence or fall behind. By extension, this would be true of regulatory compliance as well as operations. This article challenges the mantra of artificial intelligence as a ubiquitous agent of change. It does so through the lens of the global anticorruption regime, a transnational web of laws, regulations and norms that work together to reign in corruption. As this article demonstrates, the global anticorruption regime imposes on business firms a requirement to implement effective and up-to-date antibribery programs.

Given the prevailing conception of artificial intelligence as the newly-critical tool for business, it would be easy to interpret “effective” and “up-to-date” as requiring the use of artificial intelligence. To determine whether in fact the global anticorruption regime does, this article undertakes two analyses. First, it carefully determines the systems requirements of the type of artificial intelligence most applicable to antibribery programs – systems that can distinguish between honest and corrupt actors and transactions – and determines the regulatory constraints on the use of artificial intelligence in that way. This article then asks specifically what tasks artificial intelligence would be asked to do as part of an antibribery program, and evaluates the capacity of artificial intelligence to perform those tasks given the already determined system requirements and constraints. These analyses yield a surprising conclusion: in some instances the use of artificial intelligence would be helpful, but for most business firms, particularly for smaller firms or firms that have not experienced bribery, the use of artificial intelligence would not be helpful and could be harmful. Regulators and legal scholars must not think of artificial intelligence as a panacea; its potential use must be analyzed in the context of objectives and the capacities, needs, and limits of artificial intelligence.

About the speaker

Dr. Philip M. Nichols is the Joseph S. Kolodny Professor of Social Responsibility in Business and Professor of Legal Studies and Business Ethics at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He was Co-Chair, UN/CEFACT Law Group (United Nations experts committee on electronic commerce and trade facilitation), 1998 to 2005.

Moderator: Professor Hans Hendrischke, Sydney Business School.

Tuesday 21 January 2025

Time: 1-2pm

Venue: Boardroom, Level 4, New Law Building, Eastern Avenue, University of Sydney, Camperdown campus

CPD Points: 1

Register here

This event is jointly sponsored by the Sydney Centre for Asian and Pacific Law and the Sydney Netzero Institute.

It is part of the first meeting of the UN/CEFACT working group on the white paper of ‘Addressing Conflict of Laws and Facilitating Digital Product Passports in the Critical Raw Material Value Chains’.

The next chapter of IBC: Innovations and expectations for India’s insolvency framework
2025-02-03 18:00 - 19:00 | New Law Building (F10)
In-person event

This seminar will discuss developments in India’s Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code 2016 over the past year, including creditor recoveries of over $40 billion and major real estate resolutions that have safeguarded homebuyer interests and facilitated the completion of stalled projects, supported by innovative frameworks like the ‘Reverse CIRP’. The seminar will also discuss continuing controversies under the IBC including the absence of a framework for non-corporate debtors, the use of ADR within the IBC and cross border insolvencies and the IBC.

The IBC’s achievements in 2024 underscore its critical role in India’s economy. However, the next chapter will require bold reforms to tackle unresolved issues, including cross-border insolvency, non-corporate debtor inclusion, and sector-specific resolutions, ensuring a more inclusive and robust insolvency regime.

This seminar explores the challenges that lie ahead for India and what to expect in the coming year.

About the speaker

Preeti Nalavadi is a qualified and admitted corporate lawyer from India with over 15 years of experience. She has worked in different capacities both in Australia and in India including working as an Inhouse Counsel at Canara Bank (for 11 years), one of the leading Banks in India.

She is currently a Doctoral Candidate at Adelaide Law School under the supervision of Associate Prof Dr Sylvia Villios, Emeritus Prof Chris Symes and Associate Prof David Brown. Her thesis topic is Comparative and functional study of corporate rescue in three countries- US Australia and India. She had been awarded Commonwealth and Zelling Gray Scholarships. She is a Sessional Academic for undergrad and postgrad courses and mainly teaches Commercial and Business laws at Adelaide Law School.

During her candidature she has been invited to present her research at various international conferences organised by the Australian Corporate Law Teachers Association (Scola), Australia and New Zealand Law History and Society, Ross Parson Centre at Sydney Law School and Prof Bob Wessels’ PhD Conference (Leiden University). She is working on publications for peer reviewed journals. She had been a guest speaker at Indian Institute of Corporate Affairs, Delhi, a flagship institution under the Ministry of Corporate Affairs, Government of India.

She is a member of INSOL ERA (the UK), American Bankruptcy Institute (the US), Australian Asian Lawyers’ Association (Australia), Australasian Law Academic Association (Australia), Society of Corporate Law Academics (Australia). She is co-convenor of Emerging Scholars Committee at Insolvency Law Academy (India).

Chair: Professor Jason Harris, Sydney Law School

Monday 3 February 2025

Time: 6-7pm

Venue: Level 4, New Law Building, Eastern Avenue, University of Sydney, Camperdown campus

CPD Points: 1

Register

This event is proudly hosted by the Ross Parsons Centre at the University of Sydney Law School.

2025 George Winterton Memorial Lecture: The evolving electoral system as an ongoing constitutional process
2025-02-19 17:30 - 19:00 | Banco Court, Supreme Court of NSW (184 Phillip Street, Sydney), 184 Phillip Street, Sydney, NSW, Australia
Speaker: The Honourable Stephen John Gageler AC, Chief Justice of Australia

About the lecture

The form of popular sovereignty empowered by the Australian Constitution was framed to be government by “the people” in constitutive and routine manifestations, both sustaining and sustained by the system of government it called into existence. It was framed to be dynamic, the design of the electoral system according to which the people would act in those distinct manifestations having been entrusted to development by ordinary law made by the Commonwealth Parliament. And it can be seen to have evolved: through the development of a broad franchise to be exercised by the people today in fact comprising the large portion of the community entitled to vote at federal elections and at constitutional referenda; and through the establishment of a system of compulsory voting by which the people today in fact exercise that broad franchise. The form of popular sovereignty empowered by the Australian Constitution can accordingly be seen today to be government by “the people” writ large. Chief Justice Gageler traces this evolution as a process by which ordinary law has built out the constitutional structure empowering popular sovereignty.

About the speaker

Stephen Gageler AC was appointed Chief Justice of the High Court of Australia on 6 November 2023, having served as a justice of the High Court from 2012. He was appointed Senior Counsel in 2000 and Solicitor-General of Australia in 2008. In 2017, he was appointed a Companion of the Order of Australia. His Honour is a graduate of the Australian National University and Harvard University.

George Winterton Memorial Fund

The George Winterton Memorial Lecture was established to commemorate the outstanding and lasting contribution of Professor George Winterton to constitutional law scholarship and our understanding of constitutional law. It is funded through the George Winterton Memorial Fund. The Fund exists to support advancing constitutional law at Sydney Law School through teaching, research, and community engagement in memory of Professor Winterton.

For those interested in making a gift to the George Winterton Memorial Fund, please contact Dr Joel Harrison, Convenor of the Fund and Winterton Lecture series (joel.harrison@sydney.edu.au). Your gift will be gratefully used for sustaining the Winterton Memorial lecture series, supporting a PhD and research scholarship fund, and developing new research in constitutional law.

Wednesday 19 February 2025

Time: 5.30-6.45pm (Registration from 5pm, cocktail reception to follow)Venue: Banco Court, Supreme Court of NSW (184 Phillip Street, Sydney)

Register here

This lecture is proudly hosted by The University of Sydney Law School and The University of Western Australia Law School.

White boxing the administrative state: Machine learning algorithms and the duty to give reasons in administrative law
2025-02-26 13:00 - 14:00 | Common Room, Level 4, New Law Building (F10), Eastern Avenue, Camperdown campus, New Law Building, Camperdown, 2006, Australia
In-person event

This presentation uses contemporary examples of automated systems operating in the UK and Australia to examine the duty to give reasons and the extent to which automated systems currently in use in the administrative state give effect to the duty.

The discussion seeks to answer three questions: [1] what are the purposes of the duty to give reasons in administrative law, [2] what information must be disclosed in order to satisfy those purposes, and [3] are machine learning algorithms capable of providing information that can satisfy those requirements? The analysis distinguishes between interpretable machine learning algorithms where the features determinative to the prediction are knowable and inscrutable machine learning algorithms where they are not. The argument is that interpretable machine learning algorithms (in conjunction with human decision-makers) can provide reasons that meet legal standards of justification, whereas inscrutable machine learning algorithms cannot satisfy such a duty.

The talk explores the legal implications of these findings given the context of increasing government adoption of AI in the administrative state.

About the speaker

Alexandra Sinclair is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow for the Centre for Automated Decision-making and Society (ADM+S) at Sydney Law School. She has recently come from the London School of Economics and Political Science where her PhD thesis examined using public law as an accountability mechanism for automated decision-making. Alexandra spent the last five years working for a legal NGO in London where she worked extensively on proposed policy reforms to AI regulation in the UK. Her work on frontline automated decision-making in government was covered by the Guardian and in 2023 she gave oral evidence to the House of Commons on proposed changes to the UK’s data protection law. She has recently published a piece in the journal Public Law on automated decision-making and government opacity in the UK state.

Chair: Professor Lisa Burton-Crawford, Sydney Law School

Wednesday 26 February 2025

Time: 1-2pm

Venue: Sydney Law School, Common Room, Level 4, New Law Building, Eastern Avenue, University of Sydney, Camperdown campus

CPD Points: 1

This event is co-hosted by the University of Sydney Law School and ADM+S.

2025 Sydney Centre for International Law "Year in Review"
2025-02-28 09:00 - 17:00 | Common Room, Level 4, New Law Building (F10), Eastern Avenue, Camperdown campus, New Law Building, Camperdown, 2006, Australia
The Sydney Centre for International Law at Sydney Law School is delighted to present the tenth International Law Year in Review Conference, to be held at the Law School on Friday 28 February 2025.

This annual ‘year in review’ conference gives participants insight into the latest developments in international law over the preceding year, including those most salient for Australia.

This all-day, event features Professor Aaron Fellmeth of the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law as keynote speaker and includes insights on important legal developments in 2024. Nick Bryant, one of the BBC’s finest foreign correspondents, joins us for a literary lunch where he will discuss his latest book The Forever War.

The conference will traverse recent developments in areas such as public international law, private international law, international criminal law and international environmental law. Speakers will include leading academics, practitioners and government lawyers.

Participation will enable lawyers and non-lawyers alike to remain abreast of important trends in international affairs.

Friday 28 February 2025

Time: 9am – 5pmVenue: Common Room, Level 4, New Law Building, University of Sydney

View the program here

Registration$50 for full day attendance$25 for full day student attendance

Register here

This event is proudly hosted by the Sydney Centre for International Law at the University of Sydney Law School.

The environmental damage of rare earth mining: Regulatory challenges in China
2025-03-05 13:00 - 14:00 | Level 4, New Law Building (F10), Eastern Avenue, University of Sydney, Camperdown, Level 4, New Law Building (F10), Eastern Avenue, Camperdown, NSW, 2006, Australia
In-person event

Rare earth elements (REE) are critical raw materials essential for manufacturing wind turbines, solar panels, and electric vehicles. As nations strive to meet net-zero emission targets under the Paris Agreement, the global demand for REE is expected to surge in the green energy transition. However, rare earth mining and processing often result in significant and sometimes irreversible harm to the ecosystem.

China, the global leader in REE extraction and production, has dominated the industry for decades, largely on the strength of historically unregulated mining practices. This seminar will explore the environmental damage of REE extraction and production in China and examine the regulatory challenges in the implementation of permit control, environmental impact assessment, and eco-environmental remediation. By engaging with case studies involving courts, agencies and procuratorates as well as the central and local governments, we will gain a better understanding of the real-world complexity and the Chinese approach to pollution prevention and environmental remediation.

About the speaker

Yuhong Zhao is an associate professor from the Chinese University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law. She teaches Chinese Civil Law and Chinese Environmental Law on both the LLB and the LLM programmes. Her research interests are Chinese environmental law, climate law and policy, and comparative environmental law. She is the author of Chinese Environmental Law (Cambridge University Press, 2021) and has published extensively with prestigious academic law journals on issues of climate change, environmental enforcement, environmental impact assessment, environmental dispute resolution, land contamination, and biodiversity conservation.

Wedneday 5 March

Time: 1-2pm

Venue: Room TBC, Level 4, New Law Building, Eastern Avenue, University of Sydney, Camperdown campus

CPD Points: 1

This event is proudly co-presented by the Centre for Asian and Pacific Law at the University of Sydney Law School, and The China Studies Centre at the University of Sydney.

JSI Seminar | Democracy’s people
2025-03-06 18:00 - 19:30 | Common Room, Level 4, New Law Building (F10), Eastern Avenue, Camperdown campus, New Law Building, Camperdown, 2006, Australia
In-person event

In the Voice Referendum, one major reason for voting No was the conviction among some Australians that the Australian people ought to be seen as single and undivided; for these Australians, the recognition of divisions within the polity would be inconsistent with the equal, democratically-grounded citizenship of all Australians.

In this seminar I explore the relationship between democracy and how one defines “the people”. A common approach suggests that “the people” ought to be defined only by the scope of the institutions themselves. On this view, for the purposes of democratic governance, the people are a purely institutional creation, formed by the rules that determine the boundaries of the state (“the institutionalist position”). A second common approach treats “the people” as formed exogenously. Peoples are defined pre-politically, typically in cultural terms. Those peoples possess the right to self-determination; they determine their own political structure (“the culturalist position”).

Each of these positions is over-simplified. I advance a “hybrid position”, which recognizes (in response to the culturalists) that there are often multiple potential definitions of the people, that “the people” is not purely pre-political, and that the value of democratic self-government can help us to weigh those potential definitions; and (in response to the institutionalists), that democratic self-government is inevitably shaped by cultural factors, and thus, for reasons internal to democratic theory, the structure of democratic institutions can legitimately include certain adaptations to those factors.

About the speaker

Jeremy Webber is Professor Emeritus of Law at the University of Victoria (Canada) and Professorial Fellow at the University of Melbourne. He has written widely in legal theory, constitutional theory, Indigenous rights, federalism, cultural diversity, and constitutional law in Canada and in relation to other countries (especially Australia).

Professor Webber began his career at McGill University (1987-1998), was Dean of Law at the University of Sydney (1998-2002), then Canada Research Chair in Law and Society at the University of Victoria (2002-2014), until he surrendered that chair to become Dean of Law at UVic (2013-2018) and finally Professor Emeritus from 2023 until now. He was appointed a Fellow of the Trudeau Foundation in 2009, Fellow of Royal Society of Canada in 2016, and Honorary Professorial Fellow at the University of Melbourne in 2023.

Thursday 6 March 2025, 6-7.30pm AEDT

Venue: Level 4, Common Room, New Law Building (F10), Eastern Avenue, Camperdown campus

CPD Points: 1.5

This event is proudly presented by the Julius Stone Institute of Jurisprudence at The University of Sydney Law School.

JSI Seminar | Polyvocal constitutionalism
2025-03-14 13:00 - 14:00 | Common Room, Level 4, New Law Building (F10), Eastern Avenue, Camperdown campus, New Law Building, Camperdown, 2006, Australia
In-person event

Constitutional theory increasingly recognizes that constitutional norms are shaped and implemented by a broad range of actors – at different levels of government, across different institutions, and from the “top down” and “bottom up”. Polyvocal constitutionalism of this kind also has a range of advantages: it has potential epistemic benefits, can enhance the political and sociological legitimacy of the process of constitutional construction, and increase support for core democratic norms. At the same time, there is clear scope for debate about how constitutionalism should work in a polyvocal world: should poly-vocalism, for example, be premised on ongoing constitutional contestation or a preference for the resolution of constitutional controversies? And within this spectrum, what values or ethos should guide courts as they engage with other actors: for example, deference, collaboration or democratic responsiveness? This article explores these questions, and offers a partial defence of responsiveness as the most desirable model of polyvocal constitutionalism, in a world of rich choice.

About the speaker

Rosalind Dixon is a Scientia Professor and Director of the Gilbert + Tobin Centre of Public Law Sydney.

Friday 14 March

Time: 1-2pm

Venue: Common Room, Level 4, New Law Building, Eastern Avenue, University of Sydney, Camperdown campus

CPD Points: 1

This event is proudly presented by the Julius Stone Institute of Jurisprudence at The University of Sydney Law School.

Professionalising bank culture
2025-03-18 13:00 - 14:00 | Common Room, Level 4, New Law Building (F10), Eastern Avenue, Camperdown campus, New Law Building, Camperdown, 2006, Australia
In-person event

This talk is a critical examination of the cultural impact of the Senior Managers and Certification Regime (SMCR) in the UK and the Banking Executive Accountability Regime (BEAR), recently expanded into the Financial Accountability Regime (FAR), in Australia. Though various reports in the UK and Australia have determined that these IARs are already starting to have a positive impact on the culture of the financial services sector, there are also some indications to the contrary, which are often minimised.

Drawing on legal and regulatory theory, criminological theory, and behavioural psychology, this talk explores how these IARs can work better in practice, setting out a normative roadmap for both regulators and financial institutions to consider when implementing and executing these regimes. It explores, for example, the case for implementing a “process sandbox” to provide guidance on the operation and implementation of IARs, where there is a lack of clarity as to how provisions of the IAR will be interpreted by regulators. This would provide the opportunity to increase mutual understanding of regulatory expectations thereby enhancing the probability that regulatory objectives will be met.

In addition, the talk explores the case for further professionalising the banking sector, as recommended by the UK Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards in 2013 and the Australian Royal Commission into Misconduct in the Banking, Superannuation and Financial Services Industry in 2019. In particular, it employs regulatory theory (meta-regulation), behavioural psychology (groups as moral anchors), and criminological theory (stakes in conformity), to explore how increased professionalisation is a form of control and attachment, creating particular group dynamics which can inform individual decision-making processes and help to generate more ethical actions to prevent wrongdoing. It is argued that professionalism can be enhanced by educational requirements that emphasise members’ commitment to serve a positive social purpose, beyond profit-maximisation, and through mechanisms for members to be disciplined by their community for failing to honour their duties.

About the speaker

Joe McGrath is an Irish Research Council Scholar, an Ireland-Canada Scholar, a Fulbright Scholar, and an Associate Professor of Law at the Sutherland School of Law, University College Dublin, Ireland. He researches corporate governance, financial regulation, and white-collar crime. He is the author and editor of several books and publishes in the leading-peer reviewed journals in Ireland, Europe, Australia, and the USA.

Tuesday 18 March

Time: 1-2pm

Venue: Common Room, Level 4, New Law Building, Eastern Avenue, University of Sydney, Camperdown campus

CPD Points: 1

This event is proudly presented by the University of Sydney Law School.

Let’s Talk About Corporations: From Monopoly to Lego: Building a more competitive economy from the ground up
2025-03-19 17:00 - 18:30 | Common Room, Level 4, New Law Building, Eastern Avenue, University of Sydney, Camperdown campus
In-person event

In his 2023 launch of Let’s Talk About Corporations (a series of boardroom conversations organised by the Sydney Law School and the University of Queensland Law School), the former Chair of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, Professor Rod Sims AO called for a revitalisation and reform of competition law and policy in Australia.Join us for the inaugural Let’s Talk About Corporations event of 2025 with a talk by the The Hon Dr Andrew Leigh MP, Assistant Minister for Charities, Treasury and Competition, Assistant Minister for Employment discussing the recent policy focus on fostering competition across industries.

Presenter

Andrew Leigh is the Assistant Minister for Competition, Charities, Treasury and Employment, and Federal Member for Fenner in the ACT. Prior to being elected in 2010, Andrew was a professor of economics at the Australian National University. He holds a PhD in Public Policy from Harvard, having graduated from the University of Sydney with first class honours in Arts and Law. Andrew is a past recipient of the Economic Society of Australia’s Young Economist Award and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Social Sciences.

Wednesday 19 March 2025

Time: 5-6.30pm

Venue: Common Room, Level 4, New Law Building, Eastern Avenue, University of Sydney, Camperdown campus

CPD Points: 1.5

The Let’s Talk About Corporations series is a joint project of Sydney Law School and UQ Law School.

Corporate re-domiciliation: a comparative perspective
2025-04-02 17:00 - 18:00 | Common Room, Level 4, Sydney Law School
In-person event

Globally there is a diversity of approaches to corporate re-domiciliation, which involves the transfer of registration of a company from its place of incorporation to another jurisdiction. While some jurisdictions have allowed this, others such as the United Kingdom (UK) are in the process of considering the viability of such a regime. While some allow both inward and outward re-domiciliation, a few jurisdictions allow only the inward variety. This seminar explores the motivating factors surrounding corporate re-domiciliation, the varied regimes among key jurisdictions, the differing roles of corporate regulators, and the policy considerations that deal with possible concerns surrounding the process. It does so with specific focus on the laws or proposals in the UK, Singapore and Hong Kong, among other key jurisdictions.

Presenter

Umakanth Varottil is Vice Dean (Graduate Studies) and Professor at the Faculty of Law, National University of Singapore. He specialises in corporate law and governance, mergers and acquisitions and corporate finance. While his work is generally comparative in nature, his specific focus is on India and Singapore.

Umakanth is a Research Member of the European Corporate Governance Institute (ECGI). He is also an editor of the Indian Law Review, Asian Journal of Comparative Law, Singapore Journal of Legal Studies, Oxford Business Law Blog and the ECGI Blog. Prior to his foray into academia, Umakanth was a partner at a pre-eminent law firm in India. During that time, he was also ranked as a leading corporate/mergers & acquisitions lawyer in India by the Chambers Global Guide.

Wednesday 2 April 2025, 5-6pm AEDT

Venue: Level 4, Common Room, New Law Building (F10), Eastern Avenue, Camperdown campus

CPD Points: 1

This event is proudly presented by the Centre for Asian and Pacific Law and the Ross Parsons Centre for Commercial, Corporate and Taxation at the University of Sydney Law School.

JSI Seminar | On the nature of legal reasoning: Rules, knowledge and concepts
2025-04-03 13:00 - 14:00
This seminar is part of a larger work on legal reasoning. The seminar focuses on three aspects of our reasoning capabilities, to provide a sense of the intellectual territory we inhabit when we engage in legal reasoning. The seminar presents a broadly Wittgensteinian approach to rules and rule-following and the nature of knowledge, in particular the distinction between ‘knowing how’ and ‘knowing that’ and the relationship between the two. Lastly, it considers the ‘concept’ of concepts and of legal concepts in particular, and the vexed question of whether ‘conceptual analysis’ has any role to play in legal reasoning.

About the speaker

James Penner (B.Sc (Genetics) University of Western Ontario (1985), LLB University of Toronto (1988), DPhil Oxford (1992)) is Kwa Geok Choo Professor of Property Law at the University of Singapore, which he joined in 2013. He formerly taught at Brunel University, the London School of Economics, King’s College London, and University College London. He is one of the world’s leading scholars in the philosophy of property and the law of trusts, and writes more widely in the areas of private law and the philosophy of law. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Alberta, the University of Queensland, Queen’s University (Canada), Jilin University, the Catholic University of Leuven, the University of Toronto and Harvard University and, most recently, at the Centre for Transnational Legal Studies in London.

Thursday 3 April

Time: 1-2pm

Venue: Common Room, Level 4, New Law Building, Eastern Avenue, University of Sydney, Camperdown campus

CPD Points: 1

This event is proudly presented by the Julius Stone Institute of Jurisprudence at The University of Sydney Law School.

Julius Stone Address: Legal practice and the responsibility of individuals
2025-04-09 18:00 - 19:30 | Law Foyer, Level 2, New Law Building (F10), University of Sydney, Camperdown Campus
In-person event

Some legal practices, such as the private law of obligations and property, are justified by the good that general compliance with their rules bring about. It cannot be said, however, that each particular act of compliance by individuals itself contributes to that good outcome. And yet there is clearly an ethical tie between individuals and the rules of the practices. Leaving aside cases where the law simply protects independent moral rights, the same points can be made about compliance with law generally. This lecture explores the question of how we should understand the ethical tie between individuals and legal practices that are justified in terms of the social good produced by general compliance. An imperfect duty of impartial beneficence will play a central role in the account.

About the speaker

Liam Murphy works in legal, moral, and political philosophy and the application of these inquiries to law, legal institutions, and legal theory. Subjects of his publications range from abstract questions of moral philosophy (for example, “Nonlegislative Justification,” in Jeff McMahan et al., Principles and Persons: The Legacy of Derek Parfit, 2021) to concrete issues of legal and economic policy (for example, The Myth of Ownership: Taxes and Justice, 2002, co-authored with Thomas Nagel). A central theme in all Murphy’s work is that legal, moral, and political theory cannot be pursued independently of one another; they are, in fact, different dimensions of a single subject. This theme is evident in his book What Makes Law (2014), which locates the traditional philosophical issue of the grounds of law (the factors that determine the content of the law in force) within broader issues of political theory.

Much of Murphy’s recent work has been in the field of private law theory, though he has also recently returned to tax policy, writing a new paper with Thomas Nagel on wealth taxation. Going forward, Murphy is working on a book project that concerns the connections and differences among the justifications of practices (including legal practices) and the moral requirements that apply to individuals, collectives of individuals, and states. Murphy has been awarded fellowships at Columbia’s Society of Fellows in the Humanities, Harvard’s Society of Fellows, and the National Humanities Center. He was vice dean of NYU School of Law from 2007 to 2010.

Wednesday 9 April 2025

Time: 6-7.30pmVenue: Law Foyer, Level 2, New Law Building

This event is hosted by the Julius Stone Institute of Jurisprudence at The University of Sydney Law School.

The Julius Stone Address is generously sponsored by the Educational Heritage Foundation. It is named to commemorate the life and work of Professor Julius Stone, Australia’s foremost legal philosopher and for many years Challis Professor of International Law and Jurisprudence at The University of Sydney.
