2020 Kirby Seminar List

Current Issues in Australian Citizenship

Thursday 27 August 2020 1pm AEDT

Professor Kim Rubenstein, Faculty of Business, Governance and Law University of Canberra

In this Kirby seminar, Professor Kim Rubenstein will draw together a mix of ‘current issues’ that involve questions of Australian citizenship and identity: the High Court decisions of Love and Thoms v the Commonwealth [2020] HCA 3 (11 February 2020)  the Palace Letters (Hocking v Director General of the National Archives of Australia [2020] HCA 19 (29 May 2020) ) and the forthcoming High Court matter in which Zehra Duman, an Australian born woman in a refugee camp, has initiated proceedings around the constitutionality of the stripping of citizenship from dual citizens.

Professor Rubenstein will tie each of these cases into her work around citizenship and the Australian constitution, and her view, that the reasons for the failure to include Australian citizenship in the framing of the Constitution are foundational to all of these current matters.

A Stolen Life: The Bruce Trevorrow Case

Monday 7 September 2020 at 1pm AEST

Dr Tony Buti, Senior Honorary Research Fellow, School of Law, University of Western Australia and Member of Legislative Assembly for Armadale (ALP), Western Australian Parliament

On Christmas Day 1957, Joe Trevorrow walked through the blistering heat to seek help for his sick baby boy. When relatives agreed to take Bruce to hospital, Joe was relieved – his son was in safe hands – but, within days, Bruce would be living with another family, and Joe would never see his son again. At the age of ten, Bruce would be returned to his Indigenous family, sparking a lifelong search for an identity that could never truly be known and a court case that made history: Trevorrow v State of South Australia [No 5] [2007] SASC 285, the story of the only member of the Stolen Generations to win compensation for his removal from his family: http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/AILRev/2007/70.pdf

Dephysicalised Property and Shadow Lands

Wednesday 4 November 2020 at 12 noon AEDT

Associate Professor Nicole Graham, the University of Sydney Law School

In this Kirby seminar, Associate Professor Nicole Graham will present the argument that not knowing or caring that life depends entirely on the material conditions and limits of a given landscape is the sign of an already dematerialised culture (Plumwood 2008, 141; McManus and Haughton 2006, 118). The dominant legal model of dephysicalised property encourages dematerialisation.

Dephysicalised property has been instrumental to the dispossession of human and non-human communities from their lands and the disentanglement of integrated ecologies into separable natural resources and eco-services. The simplicity of the dephysicalised model of modern property relations masks the complex, dynamic and networked nature of peopled landscapes, allowing landholders to disown the adverse consequences of their proprietorship. This chapter critically reviews the concept of dephysicalised property, its geographical manifestations, and its corollary: the disownership and externalization of its material conditions and products. Dephysicalised property facilitates a powerful cultural fantasy that whatever externalities there may be, their cost will be borne by anonymous and future others, in the ‘distant elsewhere’ (Wackernagel and Rees 1996) of ‘shadow’ lands (Plumwood 2008, 139).

Equally healthy? Making anti-discrimination laws that work for post-pandemic Australia

Thursday 12 November 2020 at 12 noon AEDT

Associate Professor Karen O’Connell, University of Technology Sydney School of Law

In this Kirby seminar, Associate Professor Karen O’Connell will present the argument that Australian equality laws mostly create individual remedies for isolated incidents of discrimination in defined areas of public life. This has meant a focus on employment-based discrimination cases at the expense of addressing broader issues of health and environmental harms. The past year has highlighted these gaps and flaws in Australia’s system of anti-discrimination law, as affected by global health and environmental crises along with disturbing accounts of growing social and economic inequality. Using examples from sex discrimination law, this seminar considers how we might integrate the lessons learned from these contemporary disruptions to better address inequality in the future.

Horizontal Censorship – The law on the ability of organisations to restrain the free speech of others

Thursday 3 December 2020 at 12 noon AEDT

Professor Graeme Orr, University of Queensland School of Law

In this Kirby seminar, Professor Graeme Orr will present the argument that we used to think of ‘censorship’ as something imposed by governments or judges.  Something top-down. Increasingly, organisations are restraining and even sanctioning the speech of those they deal with – or refuse to deal with.  This talk will comment on the emerging and piecemeal law in this area.  Contractual and property rights, and limits in anti-discrimination and employment protections.  In a legal liberalism, this presents an intractable clash between ‘free speech’ and the ‘freedom to dissociate’ from such speech.  In reality, the question is more one about the brand conscious power of organisations and uncertain norms about the time and manner of speech, in the social media age.

The Rise of Global Lawyering- The Influence of Law Schools, New Technologies and Large Law Firms

Monday 14 December 2020 at 12 noon AEDT

Professor Roman Tomasic, University of South Australia Justice and Society

In this Kirby seminar, Professor Roman Tomasic will present the argument that globalization has created a new legal order in which lawyers will need to operate effectively as legal natives.  It is likely to have a major effect upon the law firms that service the legal needs of major corporate clients as well as other global actors.

Globalization will also have consequential effects on law schools and encourage them to provide suitably trained lawyers to work in the newly emerging networked world. Globalization is driven by technological innovation and advances in international communication; at the same time, global professional and corporate networks have challenged the dominance of the law of the sovereign state.   This will transform the nature of the legal profession and will lead larger law firms to adopt many of the business structures and goals of their internationally active corporatized clients.

Traditional legal values are challenged as larger law firms move to reshape long-standing professional codes of conduct and internal practices.  Law schools are drawn into this process of globalization, with legal education f being rapidly transformed, a process accelerated by parallel technological changes affecting legal education and legal practice.