Jane Wangmann: Associate Professor, Faculty of Law

About my work

I am a leading Australian scholar on legal responses to domestic and family violence. The originality and strength of my research is that I work across areas of law (civil protection orders, criminal law and family law primarily). I have particular expertise in understanding how law defines, understands and conceives of domestic and family violence. My research is multi-disciplinary, drawing on socio-legal research methods and feminist legal theory to investigate the intersection of law and domestic violence and improved access to justice. My most recent work has concerned debates about whether coercive control should be criminalised, and the impact of self-representation in family law proceedings involving family violence (with UTS Professor Tracey Booth and Miranda Kaye). This last project was funded by Australia's National Research Organisation for Women’s Safety (ANROWS), and made important recommendations to improve the safety and experiences of those involved such proceedings. My expertise in this area is illustrated by my continuing contributions to public policy.

A memorable win

It is incredibly important to me that my research and policy contributions reflect and are responsive to women’s lived experience of violence and their experiences with law. I am fundamentally interested in how the law is practiced and experienced, as it is here where the law lives.  The things that are memorable to me reflect this. In my early work as a solicitor it was being able to successfully translate my client’s experience of violence and abuse into something the court understood and recognised. As a researcher it has been the feedback I have received from victims and survivors, and the services that support them that my work has spoken of their experiences and has documented that in a way that is useful to generate change in the law and policy. As a researcher it is also gratifying to see your work result in change to legislation. When working on the self-representation project the research team wrote a number of articles about the problem of a victim being directly cross-examined by the perpetrator of that violence. Most jurisdictions have addressed this problem, but at the time the Northern Territory was still one to act on this problem. The research team provided the NT Attorney’s General’s Department with copies of our research and were later notified that our research informed the passage of the Evidence and other Legislation Amendment Act 2020.

Bio: Jane Wangmann is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Law. Jane has been part of UTS since 2010 and is a leader in the delivery of the first year law program. She is Faculty Co-Director of the Brennan Justice and Leadership Program – an innovative and unique voluntary program offered by UTS Law and the Law Student’s Society to build on and enthuse student’s interest in, and commitment to, social justice. Jane is currently one of the convenors of the Feminist Legal Research Group.

Jane’s research is centred on legal responses to domestic and family violence. In this work, Jane draws on over 25 years of work in this field. Jane has previously worked as a solicitor in a community legal centre that specialised in domestic and family violence, as a senior policy officer in the then Violence Against Women Specialist Unit in the NSW Attorney General's Department, and at the Australian Law Reform Commission. Jane is currently a non-government sector expert appointed to the NSW Domestic Violence Death Review Team (2014- present), which is responsible for reviewing domestic violence related homicides in order to examine any gaps in the service delivery system and to make recommendations to enhance safety.  

Websites

UTS profile page: https://profiles.uts.edu.au/Jane.Wangmann