The Australian Feminist Law Journal

Abstract. Basic to contemporary problems in the disciplines of representation and interpretation is a split between a naïve acceptance of bare facts, presumed to exist in their own 'objective' world of objects, and the actions of subjects who interpret...

Abstract .This introductory essay teases out the ghosts of a Law and Humanities Past to find an unlikely candidate as an advocate for a relationship between law and the humanities: Sir William Blackstone. In contemplating what constitutes Law and Humanities...

Abstract.This article analyses an exhibition of photographs of Rwandan women and their children born from rape, as an occasion for exploring how the racialised and gendered subjects of international law are imagined and how a certain politics of humanitarianism...

Abstract.Where is the Law in Star Wars? Why in films so resonant with our current times, saturated with technology, enmeshed in political turmoil and structured by international-or, rather, intergalactic-commerce has the law been jettisoned like space...

Abstract.Taking an example of two indigenous women from my early 19th century family, this article examines why they were forgotten after their deaths. The article connects this forgotten phenomenon with the preoccupation of analytical jurisprudence...

Abstract.Secrets have been conventionally constructed as existing in the margins of governmental functioning, oscillating between the open and the hidden. But secrecy is in fact enfolded within everyday life: contemporary polities have expanded the boundaries...

Abstract.Jurisprudential debates on the place of law within the concept of anarchy are limited. We lack thorough arguments on whether law is negated by this concept, or whether anarchy requires some kind of specific legal organisation. This article seeks...

Abstract.Both judicial and academic analysis of so-called 'wrongful birth' cases, in which there is a negligence claim arising from the birth of a child that has resulted from negligent sterilisation or advice, can shed light upon prevailing attitudes...

Abstract.This paper explores how modern subjects have responded to the so-called death of God and what substitute objects they have tried to put in its place; these cures, or placebos as they turn out to be, have ranged from law, to reason, to work,...

Abstract.This paper was motivated by contemporary discussions around the 'future of feminism', the pessimism expressed as to feminisim's continued relevance, and the work for the feminist project that remains undone. In this paper, I use a Lacanian analysis...

Abstract.This paper explores the transformation of the concept of rights through the contingencies of Western cultural history. It follows the emergence of an autonomous nomos in fifth-century BCE Greece, and it surveys Roman law and its recovery in...

Abstract.This review of Amartya Sen's The Idea of Justice invites a reading Sen's work alongside the writings of Patricia Williams and Karin van Marie on a 'jurisprudence of generosity'. It is argued the notions of refusal and openness that underpin...

'Some of the taboos laid upon barbarian kings remind one vividly of the restrictions imposed upon murderers'Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo2'I ate someone then buried them.'Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Shell and the Kernel; Renewals of Psychoanalysis31.0...

It has recently come to my attention that my grandfather was a Holocaust collaborator. This paper is written in response to that discovery, and in response to other people's response to my various confessions of that discovery. Hence it is a personal...

Within the Australian legal archive, in native title jurisprudence and beyond, the Indigenous subject is paradoxically positioned as, simultaneously, the subject of European imperial conquest and classification, and as a unique and transgressive alterity....

1.0 INTRODUCTIONIn this article I enquire into the way that abortion was represented in the abortion law reform project in Victoria 2008. I have applied Carol Bacchi's model for policy analysis, the 'what's the problem represented to be?' approach, to...

Mary Jane Mossman has written a fascinating account of the first women lawyers1 in which New Zealand's Ethel Benjamin merits a 30-page discussion. The year after publication of her book she gave the New Zealand Law Foundation/Otago Women Lawyers' Ethel...

The papers in this special issue of the Australian Feminist Law Journal International Law and International Relations' were first presented at a workshop called 'Feminist Internationalisms: Celebrating feminist engagements with international law and...

1.0 INTRODUCTIONIn a recent special edition of the Australian Journal of Politics and History designed to review the state of the Australian academic discipline of International Relations (IR), the editors Alex Bellamy and Sara Davie s, two of Australia's...

1.0 INTRODUCTIONThe claim that feminist 'achievements' are now so substantial and 'sufficiently institutionalised' as to wield significant power in international law2 has ignited debates among feminist academics and activists. Janet Halley, the chief...

1.0 INTRODUCTIONThe feminist voice in International Humanitarian Law (IHL), that part of international law that regulates the conduct of armed conflict, has always been relatively muted. This contrasts with the vigorous contribution of feminist scholars...

Crisis, it seems, is the order of things. Today, reading a newspaper involves ingesting a steady stream of crises. Most prominently, the 'Global Financial Crisis' has occupied the media sphere for the past two years, since the collapse of the US subprime...

On 22 October 1999 Ali Bakhtiyari arrived in Australia.1 He had fled from religious and ethnic persecution at the hands of the Taliban in Afghanistan to Pakistan with his wife Roqia and their five children. Ali then left his family in Pakistan while...

On 22 May 2008, police raided the Roslyn Oxley9 art gallery in Sydney. A number of photographic works by renowned Australian photographer Bill Henson were removed on what was to be the opening night of his latest exhibition. The works featured photographs...

Judge: Afraid of Whom? Ghosts?Al-Tikriti: Afraid of the terrifying court.Judge: You're terrifying!Al-Tikriti: No, you're terrifying.Judge: Why do you always have to be the hero? Get him out of here.1A courtroom is not an arena in which dissension, particularly...

1.0 INTRODUCTIONIf the basis of a popular government in peacetime is virtue, its basis in a time of revolution is virtue and terror - virtue, without which terror would be barbaric; and terror, without which virtue would be impotent.1Over two hundred...

. . . Vitoria's scheme massively implies that it is the colonial domination which effects the relation between sovereign states. The ius gentium, the law of all peoples, relies on the already existent gentes. It says nothing of the quality positively...

1.0 INTRODUCTIONMuch has now been written about, and mostly against, the 2007 Northern Territory Emergency Intervention.2 It has been widely condemned as a land grab, as a breach of the Racial Discrimination Act 1975 (Cth), as a cynical bid for votes...

- ...Yet in these societies surrounded and traversed by forms of protection, preoccupations over security remain omnipresent. It is impossible to evade the troubling character of this fact by pretending that the sense of insecurity is only a delusion...

Grata Matilda Flos GreigVictoria, Australia 1905The inspiration for this paper was a short comment in the Commonwealth Law Review, entitled 'The Law as a Profession for Women,' published in March 1909.1 The author of the comment was Grata Matilda Flos...

To have justice without healing is not possible, it is just short changing people. To heal, a person must be able to come to a place that is safe and allows them to deal with the pain of the past, process this and begin their healing journey. If people...

This essay reviews Chloe Hooper's non-fiction novel The Tall Man: Death and Life on Palm Island, a book about the 2004 death in custody of Cameron (who will hereafter be referred to as Mulrunji)1 Doomadgee on Palm Island in far north Queensland. After...

Hi,Writing-begins, without you, without I, without law, without knowing, without light, without hope, without bonds, without anyone close to you, for if world history goes on, you are not in it, you are 'in' 'hell' , and hell is where I am not but where...

1.0 METHODSThis is an inquiry into the relationship between flesh and the legal person. Flesh is the most material aspect of human existence, while the legal person is one of its most abstract manifestations. The comprehension and reconciliation of these...

Do we really want to switch from the marginality of our official quasi non-existence to being citizens equal to men? Or do we want to use this marginality as a starting point for changing our condition and all of society with it?1What is, or should be,...

1.0 INTRODUCTION: THINKING AND DOINGMost of everyday law is conducted performatively and not in writing. Our daily life interactions are embodied. They do not need to be recorded on paper to be effective.1In July 2006 we were invited to participate in...

1.0 MUSICAnd he sent flowers and wine to my room,And we both got happily drunk,Yes, we both got perfectly drunk.Something like that anyway, but I'm probably mixing up the words a bit - it's been a long long time since I heard that song. Joan Baez and...

"By the time the genocide was over, I was so angry, at America, America the beautiful, America the brave"2In 1994, countries around the world failed to respond to the genocide of the Rwandan Tutsis. As the Tutsis were systematically persecuted and murdered...

1.0 INTRODUCTIONContinental European international law since the 16th century, the jus publicum Europaeum, originally and essentially was a law among states - among European sovereigns. This European core determined the nomos of the rest of the earth.1The...

In this article I explore the traces of a popular English constitutional jurisprudence as it appears in two examples of widely consumed English popular culture, the successful film Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994), I and the extensively consumed BBC...

1.0 INTRODUCTIONDavid Indermaur has observed that '[w]here the judgments of the court appear to disregard public sensitivities there is good copy for the media.'1 So it was not entirely surprising that Australian newspapers and websites jumped on the...

Sex work is work.... Travel is dream of sex workers. I think it not only dream of sex workers.... It is a dream, it means it is like, they can make money to support their family, but they can't money to go to holiday, because there is no money to go...

Law reform in the area of homosexual rights usually proceeds as if heterosexuality is outside its scope and interests. What remains unthought, therefore, is the way in which heterosexuality functions not simply as a paradigm of the rights to be enjoyed...

1.0 INTRODUCTIONWhat is emergng is a new penal system, a new legislative system, whose function is not so much to punish offences against these general laws concerning decency, as to protect populations and parts of populations regarded as particularly...

Mediation has long played an important role in resolving family law matters. Recent amendments to the Family Law Act 1975 (Cth) take this one step further: attendance at family dispute resolution is now effectively a compulsory pre-filing requirement...

1.0 INTRODUCTIONLesbian and gay parents and their children are becoming more visible in claiming their right to exist openly in Australian society. These families are also gathering increasing support from many sectors including law, health and education....

In the Australian Football League, West Australian teams Fremantle and West Coast have long been bitter rivals, and any meeting of the two teams on the field is heated, spiteful and frequently violent. Their clash during the April 2007 'rivalry round'...