2024 Kirby Seminar List

European Union Deforestation Regulation 2023 as an example of regulating the supply chains of companies to protect the environment globally

Adjunct Professor Anu Lahteenmaki-Uutela, Adjunct Professor, University of Turku, Finland Senior Research Scientist at Finnish Environment Institute

In-person and online: 12 noon AEST Thursday 18 July 2024

On Campus:  EBL Lecture Theatre 3, Building W40, UNE Business School

In this Kirby Seminar, Adjunct Professor Anu Lahteenmaki-Uutela will discuss the following questions: European consumption is a major driver of global deforestation. To combat this problem, European Union Deforestation Regulation starts to apply in December 2024. Only deforestation-free soy, palm oil, beef, coffee, cocoa, timber, rubber, and derived products can be sold in Europe. Companies must follow each batch to the production site.

Lähteenmäki-Uutela will speak about how European companies and states are preparing for implementation. Lähteenmäki-Uutela will use coffee and cocoa sectors as examples to describe the challenges in building transparent supply chains with millions of smallholder farmers. She will also discuss the plans of the EU to expand the law to other ecosystem types and other economic sectors, potential impacts of EU laws on global trade flows, and the plans of other countries to enact similar legislation.

Anu Lahteenmaki is a Senior Research Scientist at the Finnish Environment and Adjunct Professor at the University of Turku, Finland. She previously taught business law and responsible business at Turku School of Economics. Her current research topics include biodiversity and trade, agriculture and water protection, sustainable aquaculture, just sustainability transition, and fundamental rights

A Living Corpse: Invisible Individuals under the Death Sentence

Associate Professor Mai Sato, Faculty of Law, Monash University

In-person and online: 12 noon AEST Thursday 18 July 2024

Lewis Seminar Room, Room 30, Building WO38, School of Law

In this Kirby Seminar, Associate Professor Mai Sato will explain that the body of the executed is the obvious and inevitable outcome of the death penalty. However, to reduce the death penalty to the act of taking away life does not capture the full extent of the punishment. The death penalty begins when an individual is labelled by the State as worthy of death. Individuals live, often for years, under the death sentence. Focusing on Japanese prisoners, this presentation examines what is often an invisible, hard to research, aspect of the death penalty: how individuals live on death row. Much of the Japanese death penalty process is invisible. The Government does not release information on how prisoners are executed, the treatment of death row prisoners or the process of selecting who on death row is to be executed. This presentation uses rare photographs of penal institutions in Japan obtained by an NGO and findings from a survey of individuals on death row conducted by the Japan Federation of Bar Associations. It analyses the experiences of individuals on death row glimpsed from photographs, and a survey describes how access to both data was achieved and examines aspects of the death penalty that remain invisible.

Mai Sato is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Law at Monash University. She is the inaugural director of Eleos Justice, a collaboration between Capital Punishment Justice Project, an NGO working to end the death penalty, and Monash University Faculty of Law. Eleos is committed to the restriction and abolition of the death penalty in Asia.

Mai is a social scientist by education and has led and worked on projects on the death penalty in Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines, India, Kenya, and Zimbabwe. Her monograph The Death Penalty in Japan: Will the Public Tolerate Abolition? (Springer, 2014), and her documentary film which captured a social experiment exploring what the death penalty meant to ordinary Japanese citizens, influenced the decision by the Japan Federation of Bar Associations to become an abolitionist organisation in 2016. Mai’s interest in the death penalty is not limited to scholarly understanding of punishment and the criminal justice system. After completing a European Commission-funded project, Mai created and co-runs an NGO CrimeInfo, for abolition of the Japanese death penalty.

The Use and Abuse of Private Enforcement – Beyond (the) Horizon

Professor Kit Barker, Professor of Law at TC Beirne School of Law, The University of Queensland

12pm AEST Monday 2 September 2024 Lewis Seminar Room, W38, UNE Business School Building University of New England Armidale or online via Zoom.

Since Blackstone, conventional thinking has had it that our public laws (in particular, our criminal laws) protect public interests and that their enforcement is therefore the responsibility of the state alone, not that of private citizens. Whatever the assumption, there have always been exceptions and these exceptions carry both risk and reward. Far from decreasing in recent years, the use of private enforcement techniques is visibly on the increase across a wide band of public laws in a variety of jurisdictions.

In this Kirby seminar, Professor Kit Barker will consider the ‘risk-to-reward’ ratio of private enforcement in the light of several case-studies drawn from the United States and the United Kingdom, where the use of private enforcement has burgeoned in response to economic and political factors.  One of these case studies – The Horizon Post Office Scandal - tells such a catastrophic story of false conviction and abuse of private prosecutorial power that it has led to calls for the total abolition of the residual liberty of citizens to initiate criminal claims that still exists in England and in most Australian jurisdictions.

Kit Barker joined the TC Beirne School of Law in 2006. He was educated at Exeter College, Oxford, where he graduated with first class honours (in 1988) and subsequently completed the BCL (with distinction) in 1991. He was admitted to the Middle Temple Inn of Court as a Harmsworth Scholar and to the Bar of England and Wales in 1990. He is interested in private law but specialises in the law of torts and unjust enrichment law and the law's doctrine, philosophical foundations and remedies. More recently, his work has explored the interface between private law and public law and public policy, with a focus on the tortious liability of government, misfeasance in public office and the use of private enforcement techniques in public law.

Distortions of legal and other relationships – has the internet changed our perceptions of reality and each other?

The Honourable Steven Rares KC, Mediator, Arbitrator and Adjunct Professor at The University of New South Wales

12 pm AEST Thursday 5 September 2024 Lewis Seminar Room, W38, UNE Business School Building University of New England Armidale or online via Zoom.

Over the last three decades the internet and advances in digital technologies have changed the way we communicate with one another and receive much of the information that, previously, we obtained from physical books and the traditional media. Artificial intelligence (AI) is an emerging phenomenon that further affects daily life. AI can create plausible but artificial, media conveying what appears to be accurate information. These innovations permeate our contemporary existence and have had broad impacts including on litigation. Each of these developments has forced adjustments to how, from moment to moment we perceive, and can distinguish between what is reality, fact and fiction.  Lies are now called by their tellers ‘alternative facts’ and truthful information is derided as ‘fake news’.

Steven Rares practised at the bar for 25 years, taking silk in 1993.   He was appointed a judge of the Federal Court of Australia in February 2006 and served until November 2023. He was also a judge of the Supreme Courts of the Australian   Capital   Territory   (from   2007)   and Norfolk Island (from 2018). He heard numerous cases   in all   areas of   those   Courts’   civil   and criminal jurisdictions and delivered over 1,200 judgments at first instance and on appeal.

In 2022, Steven qualified as a mediator at Harvard Law School. In 2023 he became a professional member of the Resolution Institute as well as a supporting member of the London Maritime Arbitrators Association (LMAA) and was made a titularly member of the Comité Maritime International.

Presentation Notes (PDF, 278.1 KB)