Activities
Shaunnagh Dorsett is a legal scholar, historian and occasional jurisprudent. Regardless of genre, her work is primarily concerned with the authority of law. Authority is examined through two lenses: Crown-Indigenous relations in the first half of the nineteenth century in Australia and New Zealand and the history of civil procedure reform in the nineteenth century in empire and access to civil justice. Her present project is on institutional design and civil courts in the 1820s-1850s in Australia, New Zealand and the Cape.
Katherine Biber is a legal scholar, historian and criminologist. Her work examines the laws of evidence and criminal procedure, with a particular focus on documentation and visual culture. She is completing a projects exploring the cultural afterlife of criminal evidence. Another project examines changes in documentation practices in the digital age and the associated challenges these pose to the laws of evidence. She is also writing a legal history of Australia’s last outlaw, Jimmy Governor, who was convicted of murder in 1900 and executed in 1901.
Diane Kirkby is an historian of labour and women, employing gender analysis, concentrating on moments of lawmaking in 20th Century Australia, and tracing international connections to the US and countries of the Asia-Pacific region, most notably India and Japan. She is the author of several books. Her current research is funded by the ARC, and her latest book 'Academic Ambassadors, Pacific Neighbours' about the Australian-American Fulbright program, is forthcoming with Manchester Univ. Press. Diane is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia, a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and is an Honory Fellow of the American Society for Legal History.
Isabella Alexander’s research interests lie in the fields of legal history and intellectual property law, particularly the law of copyright. She is interested in the interactions between legal doctrine, legal institutions, new technologies and social, economic, cultural and political forces in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in both Britain and Australia. Her current research project explores the history of copyright law and cartography and is funded by the Australia Research Council.
Thalia Anthony’s research examines the histories of colonisation, Indigenous criminalisation and exploitation of Indigenous labour that shape contemporary legal narratives around Indigenous subjectivity. She has particular interest in the legal story telling of sentencing courts, civil courts (relating to the Stolen Generations), tribunals (in arbitration and human rights matters) and royal commissions. In her book, Indigenous, People, Crime and Punishment (2013) she explores sentencing courts as shape-shifters in their stories about Indigenous people and communities. Through an examination of sentencing matters for almost a century, she found that shape-shifting played an important role in renewing the legitimacy of non-Indigenous control.
Trish Luker's research interests include investigating the impact on law and legal processes of the changing nature of the documentary form, including in archival theory and in the digital age. She draws upon feminist and critical race perspectives from the fields of information science and the humanities to develop innovative and ethical approaches to court processes and material culture.
Alecia Simmonds is interested in the relationship between intimacy, imperialism and law in Australia, the Pacific and the British world. Her work has focused on exposing the affective foundations of British imperial power in the long-eighteenth century through tracing sentimental discourse used by voyagers in the Pacific back to its origins in Roman and natural law. Her work seeks to bring cultural history and the history of the emotions into conversation with intellectual and legal history.
Alecia's current postdoctoral research at UTS examines the legal regulation of love through the lens of breach of promise of marriage cases from 1824 to 1975, thus offering a longue duree history of the interaction between the state and the private sentiments of everyday people.
Eugene Schofield-Georgeson’s work investigates the reproduction of class, race and colonialism through the criminal law and its procedure, the law of evidence and labour law. His current project in the field of legal history examines the contribution to criminal law reform made by of an organising labour movement in mid-nineteenth century New South Wales.
Brett Heino's research interests lie primarily in the political economy of law. In particular, his work focuses upon how the functions and evolution of law are tied to the historical evolution of the capitalist mode of production. His book Regulation Theory and Australian Capitalism: Rethinking Social Justice and Labour Law (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017) combines Marxist jurisprudence and regulation theory to understand the place of labour law within the architecture of post-World War II Australian capitalism. His current research project involves a close analysis of key wage margins decisions from 1947-1963, seeking to plot how such cases evince a juridical crystallisation of a Fordist dynamic
