JSI Seminar: The Modern Approach to Statutory InterpretationSpeaker: Professor Dale Smith, The University of Melbourne It is now common, in Australia and in a number of other jurisdictions, to speak of “the modern approach to statutory interpretationâ€. Many of the details of this approach are unclear or contested. However, the modern approach consists at least […]
JSI Seminar: Primary Duty = Secondary Duty?This event is being held online and in-person at Sydney Law School. Speaker: Professor Claudio Michelon, Edinburgh Law School This paper addresses one of the central questions in the law of torts: what is the relationship between the primary duty and the secondary (or remedial) duty? The two dominant […]
JSI Seminar: American nullification and secession: the case for constitutional flexibilityThis event is being held online and in-person at Sydney Law School. Speaker: Professor Kit Wellman, Washington University in St Louis Americans live in a political marriage arranged by our ancestors. The good news is that the framers of our Constitution were brilliant; the bad […]
JSI Seminar: Flourishing in the AnthropoceneSpeaker: Associate Professor Nicole Graham, Sydney Law School Progressive property theory presents a recent corrective to atomistic theories that isolate property interests from the network of relations and obligations arising from the sociality of organised human society. The ‘social obligation norm’ that underpins progressive property theory stretches back to Aristotle’s […]
JSI Seminar: The Conscience of TrustSpeaker: Professor Irit Samet, King’s College London At the heart of the modern trust lies a glaring paradox: how has a legal institution that is repeatedly referred to by the courts as rooted in a duty of conscience become infamous for helping individuals to achieve goals that are patently unconscionable? […]
JSI Seminar: Jealousy of trade, from the Scottish Enlightenment to neoliberalismSpeaker: Associate Professor Jessica Whyte, UNSW In this talk, I trace the Scottish Enlightenment debates about what David Hume termed “jealousy of tradeâ€â€”that is, the transformation of international commerce into a political concern of states and a cause of international conflict. I revisit these debates […]
JSI Seminar: Children, families, and immigration enforcementSpeaker: Associate Professor Matthew Lister, Bond University What might otherwise seem like straight-forward instances of immigration enforcement can give rise to both practical and moral complications when the objects of the enforcement measures are children and/or have close family ties to citizens or legal permanent residents. In the case […]
JSI Seminar: LawmativityHybrid event Explaining the normativity of law – how it guides action by giving reasons – is one of the central questions of general jurisprudence. It is also one of the topics on which there is least agreement. In the first half of the talk, Alex Horne offers a diagnosis as to […]
Julius Stone Address: The Legal Experience of InjusticeIn-person event In The Faces of Injustice, Judith Shklar criticizes the ‘normal model’ of justice which views injustice as ‘a prelude to or a rejection and breakdown of justice, as if injustice were a surprising abnormality’. Her central insight is that ‘the real realm of injustice … does not […]
JSI Seminar: Politics all the way down? A qualified defence of critical legal theoryIn-person event In this talk, Dr Ntina Tzouvala sets out to defend the potential for legal theory of what Edward Said called ‘contrapuntal reading’, Louis Althusser (drawing from Jacques Lacan) described as ‘symptomatic read-ing’, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick denounced as ‘paranoid […]
JSI Seminar: The life of international law is not logic but experienceIn-person event U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. famously maintained that “the life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience.†Holmes statement suggests an antecedent question: what is the life of the law? This essay construes this […]
JSI Seminar: Crowdsourcing and artificial intelligence in constitutional courtsIn-person event In Judgment SU-151/2020 the Constitutional Court of Colombia rendered its decision on a constitutional complaint of a group of journalists. They claim that in certain criminal cases concerning possible corruption by government officials, prosecutors and judges were unsatisfyingly prohibiting the press to attend public criminal […]
