JSI Seminar: Law’s People

Speaker: Dr Susan Bartie, University of Tasmania

Alice Erh-Soon Tay was appointed as Challis Professor of Jurisprudence at the Faculty of Law at the University of Sydney in 1975. She became the first Asian-Australian and second woman to become a law professor at an Australian university.

Her appointment brought with it a belief among some of her new colleagues that she would close the jurisprudential arm of the Department of Jurisprudence and International Law and end decades of division within the Faculty.

Contrary to expectations, she neither closed the Department nor mended fences. The small Department continued to operate, in the face of opposition and hostility, for another 23 years. Unlike her predecessor, Professor Julius Stone, Tay is not a well-known figure among the current generation of Australian legal academics.

Drawing on this case study, as well as others described in Free Hands and Minds (Hart, 2019) and American Legal Education Abroad – Critical Histories (NYU Press, 2021 – edited with David Sandomierski), this paper will explore how and why we honour and remember certain legal figures. It will identify a range of factors, including US influence, which have distorted current understandings of academics and the discipline of law. And it will argue that in some circumstances the running of a department or faculty can be characterised as an important contribution to both the discipline of law and legal theory; a contribution which ought to be better recognised and understood.

Speaker

Dr Susan Bartie is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Tasmania. She researches the history of legal ideas, law schools and lawyers in Australian society. She is currently working on a 50-year socio-legal history of Australian environmental lawyering which, from 2022 to 2024, will be supported by an ARC Discovery Early Career Researcher Award.

Time: 6-7.30pm

This is an online event. Once you register you will receive the Zoom details.

CPD Points: 1.5

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