The IILAH Podcast

In this episode, Dr Ben Golder (UNSW Law School) and Dr Kathleen Birrell (La Trobe Law and Humanities Network) are joined by Danish Sheikh (Melbourne Law School) to discuss the art of the conference presentation. Danish Sheikh is a playwright, activist lawyer and legal researcher. He is currently working on a thesis exploring queer dissent as a form of reparative jurisprudence at the Melbourne Law School. His work has been cited by the Supreme Court of India in its decision to decriminalize homosexuality in 2018. His current research has won the Law, Literature and Humanities Association of Australasia's Postgraduate Essay Prize and the Melbourne Law School Student Published Research Prize. His first book, Love and Reparation was published by Seagull Books and distributed by University of Chicago Press in 2021.

In this episode, Dr Ben Golder (UNSW Law School), Dr Kathleen Birrell (La Trobe Law and Humanities Network) and Professor Sundhya Pahuja (Melbourne Law School) are joined by Rebecca Croser (Melbourne Law School) to discuss how to successfully edit your own work. Rebecca is a PhD candidate in Creative Writing in the Faculty of Arts, University of Melbourne and Research Officer in the Melbourne Law School. She has taught undergraduate Creative Writing and has supervised honours and masters students' thesis. Rebecca also edits books and journal articles for academics whose first language is not English.

In this episode, Dr Ben Golder (UNSW Law School) and Dr Kathleen Birrell (La Trobe Law and Humanities Network) are joined by Professor Margaret Davies (Flinders University) to discuss how to balance breadth and depth. Margaret Davies is Matthew Flinders Distinguished Professor and Research Professor in legal theory in the College of Business, Government, and Law at Flinders University. She is the author of six books, the most recent of which is EcoLaw: Legality, Life and the Normativity of Nature (2022).

In this episode, Dr Ben Golder (UNSW Law School), Dr Kathleen Birrell (La Trobe Law and Humanities Network) and Professor Sundhya Pahuja (Melbourne Law School) are joined by Ntina Tzouvala (ANU College of Law) to discuss peer review. Ntina Tzouvala is an associate professor at the ANU College of Law a Global Fellow at the NUS Centre for International Law. Her work focuses on the history, theory and political economy of international law. Her first monograph, Capitalism as Civilisation: a History of International Law (Cambridge UP, 2020), was awarded the ASIL Certificate of Merit for a preeminent contribution to creative scholarship and the Australian Legal Research Award (ALRA) in the book category.

In this episode, Dr Ben Golder (UNSW Law School), Dr Kathleen Birrell (La Trobe Law and Humanities Network) and Professor Sundhya Pahuja (Melbourne Law School) are joined by Dr Shane Chalmers (Adelaide Law School, The University of Adelaide) to discuss how to successfully edit a collection. Shane's research examines law from disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. It shares a critical concern with the legacies of European colonialism for laws and societies today, investigated through a combination of cultural analysis and historical enquiry. Shane's work has contributed to the sub-fields of law and colonialism, law and development, law and art, and jurisprudence, through publications in journals including Law and Critique, Social & Legal Studies, Law & Social Inquiry, Humanity, Griffith Law Review, Law & Literature, and Law, Culture and the Humanities.

In this episode join Sundhya Pahuja and Shaun McVeigh in conversation with Cait Storr to launch her book titled ‘International Status in the Shadow of Empire: Nauru and the Histories of International Law’. Book Description: Nauru is often figured as an anomaly in the international order. This book offers a new account of Nauru’s imperial history and examines its significance to the histories of international law. Drawing on theories of jurisdiction and bureaucracy, it reconstructs four shifts in Nauru’s status – from German protectorate, to League of Nations C Mandate, to UN Trust Territory, to sovereign state – as a means of redescribing the transition from the nineteenth century imperial order to the twentieth century state system. The book argues that as international status shifts, imperial form accretes: as Nauru’s status shifted, what occurred at the local level was a gradual process of bureaucratisation. Two conclusions emerge from this argument. The first is that imperial administration in Nauru produced the Republic’s post-independence ‘failures’. The second is that international recognition of sovereign status is best understood as marking a beginning, not an end, of the process of decolonisation.

In this episode Dianne Otto was joined by Oishik Sircar to discuss his recent publication. 'Violent Modernities: Cultural Lives of Law in the New India' (OUP 2021)uses a critical legal perspective to show that law and violence in the postcolony share a deep intimacy, where one symbiotically feeds the other. Researched and written between 2008 and 2018, the chapters study the cultural sites of literature, cinema, people's movements, popular media and the university to illustrate how law's promises of emancipation and performances of violence live a life of entangled contradictions.

In this Festival of Conversations episode Professor Hilary Charlesworth was joined in conversation with Professor Anne Orford to discuss the founding of IILAH in 2005 and the shifting relations between international law and the humanities.

Panelists engaged in a live online conversation about art-based methods in legal scholarship, teaching and practice, inviting the audience to participate in an interactive discussion about 'art', 'law' and the 'and' between. With Alice Palmer , Ruth Buchanan, Sara Ramshaw and Sean Mulcahy. At 43:13 the audience watched Ruth Buchanan's video essay 'Local Hero' this is accessible here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wl2YeSVcmU.

McVeigh and Gaita discuss the relations between morality, law and politics. Gaita has argued in, amongst other places, his contributions to 'Who’s Afraid of International Law', (which he edited with Gerry Simpson) that morality, law and politics are distinctive forms of the ethical and that, as seen from a particular ethical perspective in the Western tradition, each is sui generis. He does not equate the ethical with morality. He believes that law and politics are answerable to morality, but not reducible to it in their ethical dimensions. To see morality, law and politics as different forms of the ethical, he has argued, enables one to see why the different conceptions of responsibility distinctive to each sometimes bring (especially parts of international) law and politics into irreconcilable conflict with morality and politics sometimes with law.