Law and History

CONVENOR
Diane Kirkby

MEMBERS
Alecia Simmonds
Brett Heino
Eugene Schofield-Georgeson
Isabella Alexander
Jessie Hohmann
Katherine Biber
Nicole Watson
Thalia Anthony
Trish Luker
Shaunnagh Dorsett

GRADUATE RESEARCH STUDENT(S)
Maxwell Bonnell

UTS Law has Australia’s largest, most distinctive and most successful concentration of legal historians and scholars working at the nexus of law, history and culture. This strength is internationally recognised and its success demonstrated by the number and quality of the Group’s publications, events, invitations and visitors.

The Law and History area of excellence group examines the ways in which cultural and historical perspectives give insight into legal issues. Drawing on methodologies from history, historiography, cultural studies, critical theory, literature and archival theory and practice, scholars in the group examine historical and cultural issues arising from legal doctrines, norms, practices, processes and ways of thinking. Scholars are examining the relationship between law and Indigenous culture, histories of legal doctrines, cultural uses of legal materials, literary interpretations of law, and the entanglement of law and popular culture. Interdisciplinary work of this nature exposes the values embedded in law’s institutions, allowing scholars to assess their capacity for justice, re-configuration and reform.

The Law and History scholars are also members of the wider, cross-discipline, history group UTS HistoryLab. UTS HistoryLab is composed of scholars from Law, the Faculty of Arts and Social Science and the Faculty of Design, Architecture and Building. For all our events, see our UTS HistoryLab events diary.