Melbourne Law School - Research Publications
Permanent URI for this collection
Search Results
1 - 10 of 14
-
ItemThinking with Jurisdiction Shaun McVeigh and Sundhya Pahuja in Conversation(http://www.nomos-elibrary.de/agb, 2022-01-01)This text is based on a transcription of the keynote address given at the conference 'Who Speaks International Law', held in Bonn, Germany on 4 September 2021. We (Shaun and Sundhya) participated virtually, from Melbourne, Australia. Originally, we had suggested a conversational format for our joint keynote. The organisers then requested that we also make our keynote a bit more interactive than usual. And so, we conducted a kind of experiment in which we - Shaun and Sundhya - spoke together in a stylised conversation for 20 minutes. We then paused for about 10 minutes to hear questions and comments from the audience. We gathered those questions rather than answering them, noting them down on an electronic whiteboard everyone could see, and then spoke extemporaneously for another 20 minutes in response to the questions, comments, and the themes they raised. At the end, we took another round of questions in the traditional style. What follows is an edited version of the first twenty minutes. We have presented it here as a stylised dialogue, largely maintaining the spoken tone and conversational style (and some repetition). We have added references, and in some parts, a little elaboration for clarity, drawing on the conversation that followed.
-
ItemGlobal Poverty and the Politics of Good Intentions(Hart Publishing, 2014)In the West, the terrain of a great deal of public debate around poverty is largely delimited by two figurations; activism and expertise. For the activist, fighting global poverty has become the moral cause of a new generation, inspiring rock songs and wrist bands, and legions of celebrities from whom charity is the new accessory.
-
ItemRival Worlds and the Place of the Corporation in International Law(Oxford University Press, 2019)Struggles in the arena of international law and institutions in the years between 1955 and 1974 should be understood not so much as a battle to control a preexisting international law in an already- constituted world, but rather as marking a series of encounters between rival practices of world- making, which travelled with rival accounts of international law. The question of the corporation— how it should be understood, its relationship to both law and the state, and how it travels— was a key element of those rival worlds.
-
ItemChanging the World: The Ethical Impulse and International Law(Monash University Press, 2017)
-
ItemRethinking Iran and International Law: The Anglo-Iranian Oil Company Case Revisited(Koninklijke Brill NV, 2017)In this essay, we take up the invitation to think about Iran and international law in historical context by revisiting the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company Case of 1952 through a lens we call ‘historically inflected jurisprudence’.
-
ItemHow To Run a Writing Workshop? On the Cultivation of Scholarly Ethics in ‘Global’ Legal Education’(Taylor & Francis (Routledge), 2018)This article does two main things. First, it records and shares a methodology for running a writing workshop in the context of transnational doctoral and post-doctoral legal education. Second, it offers a critical reflection on this methodology, and in doing so draws out some more general lessons for thinking about our roles as scholars and teachers in the contemporary university. Our thesis is that the unusually formal, even stylised, structure of the writing workshops we describe not only offers participants an opportunity for detailed feedback on their work, but also helps to foster a certain ethics of scholarly conduct. This ethics emphasises the intimacy of scholarly relations on the one hand, and the importance of listening on the other. Such an ethics may be antithetical to some of the more insidious imperatives of the contemporary university.
-
ItemThe Southern Jurist as a Teacher of Laws: An Interview with Upendra Baxi(Springer Science and Business Media LLC, 2018)This interview was conducted with Upendra Baxi in early October, 2015 as part of the authors' Eminent Jurists Video Archive Project. The interview covers Baxi's formative early years in Rajkot, his education and taking up of a life of a legal scholar, including his basic legal training at the Government Law College in Bombay, graduate education at Berkeley (California), and his early career as a lecturer at the University of Sydney. In a wide ranging discussion, with his usual mixture of intellectual dexterity, endless generosity and good humour, Baxi illuminatingly discusses his understanding of the significant notions of normative expectations, eurocentrism, self-determination, along with the ongoing significance and legacies of B.R. Ambedkar and M.K. Gandhi, the experience of proposing (and eventually teaching) a course on aboriginal peoples' rights in a setter-colony, and the duties and responsibilities that come with inhabiting the roles of being teachers and students of law, amongst other things.
-
ItemCorporations, Universalism, and the Domestication of Race in International Law(Cambridge University Press, 2019)In 1960, Frantz Fanon, a Martiniquan, French trained psychiatrist, wrote not long before his death that when ‘[l]ooking at the immediacies of the colonial context, it is clear that what divides this world is first and foremost what species, what race one belongs to. In the colonies the economic infrastructure is also a superstructure. The cause is effect: You are rich because you are white, you are white because you are rich.’ Some forty years later, in a seminal article about ‘global justice’, philosopher Thomas Pogge wrote, ‘[w]e are quite tolerant of the persistence of massive and severe poverty abroad even though it would not cost us much to reduce such poverty dramatically. How well does this tolerance really fit with our commitment to moral universalism?’
-
ItemThe State and International Law: A Reading from the Global South(University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020)In this essay, we redescribe the relationship between international law and the state, reversing the imagined directionality of the flow that sequences nation-states coming first and international law second. At its most provocative, our argument is that, rather than international law being a creation of the state, making and remaking the state is a project of international law. We pay particular attention here to the institutionalized project of development in order to illuminate the ways in which international law creates and maintains nation-states, and then recirculates from a multiplicity of points “within” them.
-
ItemPublic Debt, the Peace of Utrecht and the Rivalry between Company and State(Brill, 2019)This chapter draws on the idiom of jurisdictional thinking to re- describe the Peace of Utrecht, and the events leading up to it, in terms of the rivalry in the late 17th and early 18th centuries in England, between the sovereign- territorial arrangements we now call the state, and commercial- political groupings of merchants associated in the juridical form of the joint- stock company. It suggests that in the context of this rivalry over public authority, the Peace of Utrecht marks a moment in which the practices of contest and relation between those rival actors, and their rival forms of associational life, can be seen to have been shaped and conducted through the new instrumentality of public debt. More precisely, it will suggest that the particular treaties of the Peace of Utrecht were, at least in one dimension, instruments by which borrower and creditor were brought together, or joined, and which shaped the way that relation - and contest - travelled, and particularly moved 'Southward' for both Company and State.