Melbourne Law School - Research Publications
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ItemEquality Law Protection for Legal Education: Internships, Volunteering and Clinics(Faculty of Law, Bond University, 2024)‘Practical’ legal education offers significant educational and personal benefits. However, it also comes with risks that need to be actively managed, including the risk of students experiencing harassment and discrimination. This article considers the scope of equality law, and how it applies to different forms of ‘practical’ legal education activities. It considers how equality law applies to ‘volunteer’ positions, including those in law firm partnerships, barristers’ chambers, and community organisations, legal internships and law school-run legal clinics. It considers the complexity of the legal framework, and the resulting difficulties law students might have in asserting their equality rights. It argues there is a particular need to address three gaps in the current legal framework for practical legal education activities, by: adopting a broader definition of ‘work’ to include unpaid roles; regulating harassment on grounds other than sex; and protecting law students from the actions of third parties, such as clients and members of the public.
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ItemFaces of Inequality: Reflections on Exceptional Developments(Cambridge University Press (CUP), 2024-04)In Faces of Inequality, Sophia Moreau puts forward a pluralistic theory of how discrimination wrongs people. I approach Moreau's ideas not as a legal philosopher or theorist, but as an empirical and socio-legal scholar of equality law. In this commentary, I pick up on five provocations that emerge for me from Moreau's work: on reasonable accommodations, on comparison in equality law, on the public/private divide, on the justification of discrimination, and on discrimination as a personal wrong. While Moreau's work is grounded in the common themes or shared features that emerge from equality laws across jurisdictions, I consider what these themes mean for the uncommon ground, drawing on exceptional developments in discrimination law in some Australian jurisdictions, and our experience with the “exceptional” protected characteristic of age.
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ItemCorporate Culture and Systems Intentionality: part of the regulator's essential toolkit(ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 2024-01-01)
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ItemChanging climates, compounding challenges: a participatory study on how disasters affect the sexual and reproductive health and rights of young people in Fiji.(BMJ, 2023-12-16)Pacific youth are at the forefront of the climate crisis, which has important implications for their health and rights. Youth in Fiji currently bear a disproportionate burden of poor experiences and outcomes related to their sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR). There is limited information about how the increasing climate impacts may affect their SRHR, and what the implications may be for climate action and disaster risk reduction. We aimed to explore the experiences of 21 Fijian youth in fulfilling their SRHR when living through multiple natural hazards. We conducted 2 workshops and 18 individual semistructured interviews using visual and storytelling methods. Irrespective of the type of hazard or context of disasters, participants identified limited agency as the main challenge that increased SRHR risks. Through reflexive thematic analysis, we identified four themes centred around 'youth SRHR agency'; (1) information and knowledge, (2) community and belonging, (3) needs and resources, and (4) collective risks. These themes encompassed multiple factors that limited youth agency and increased their SRHR risks. Participants highlighted how existing challenges to their SRHR, such as access to SRHR information being controlled by community gatekeepers, and discrimination of sexual and gender diverse youth, were exacerbated in disasters. In disaster contexts, immediate priorities such as water, food and financial insecurity increased risks of transactional early marriage and transactional sex to access these resources. Daily SRHR risks related to normalisation of sexual and gender-based violence and taboos limited youth agency and influenced their perceptions of disasters and SRHR risks. Findings offer important insights into factors that limited youth SRHR agency before, during and after disasters. We underscore the urgency for addressing existing social and health inequities in climate and disaster governance. We highlight four key implications for reducing youth SRHR risks through whole-of-society approaches at multiple (sociocultural, institutional, governance) levels.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableMaking robo-advisers careful? Duties of care in providing automated financial advice to consumers(ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 2021-01-01)
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ItemBoulevards of broken dreams(Law Institute of Victoria, 2024-03-01)Lawyers commencing legal action to enforce clients' rights can feel like they are confronted with an impenetrable maze. A raft of regulatory reforms proposed or in train at the start of 2024 offer a pathway through that, maze, but one which requires careful navigation.
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ItemHelping and not Harming Animals with AI(Springer, 2024-03-01)Ethical discussions about Artificial Intelligence (AI) often overlook its potentially large impact on nonhuman animals. In a recent commentary on our paper about AI’s possible harms, Leonie Bossert argues for a focus not just on the possible negative impacts but also the possible beneficial outcomes of AI for animals. We welcome this call to increase awareness of AI that helps animals: developing and using AI to improve animal wellbeing and promote positive dimensions in animal lives should be a vital ethical goal. Nonetheless, we argue that there is some value in focusing on technology-based harms in the context of AI ethics and policy discourses. A harms framework for AI can inform some of our strongest duties to animals and inform regulation and risk assessment impacts designed to prevent serious harms to humans, the environment, and animals.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableCan money buy you (climate) happiness? Economic co-benefits and the implementation of effective carbon pricing policies in Mexico(Elsevier, 2020-12)It is difficult for governments to implement effective climate change mitigation policies because they often create short-term costs for concentrated industry groups who oppose them. As such, climate policy scholars have theorized that governments will be more willing and able to implement mitigation policies where they align with other economic policy objectives. The logic of this “economic co-benefits” argument is that co-benefits create short-term gains for governments to offset the immediate costs they face in introducing mitigation policies. Through a most-similar systems design comparative study of a carbon tax and an emissions trading scheme (ETS) in Mexico, this article interrogates the economic co-benefits theory of mitigation policy adoption. By comparing the motivations underpinning two carbon pricing policies in a single country, the article suggests that the presence of immediately accruing fiscal revenues created short-term incentives for the Mexican government to implement the carbon tax, whereas such short-term incentives were not present with respect to the ETS. However, in both cases concentrated affected industry groups were able to dilute the carbon prices to which they were subject. The implications of this study are that economic co-benefits may not be as useful in achieving effective mitigation policy outcomes, in the absence of measures which also independently change the interests of concentrated industry groups.
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ItemDecarbonization in state-owned power companies: Lessons from a comparative analysis(Elsevier, 2022-06-25)A rapid decarbonization of the electricity system is urgently required for the Paris Agreement objectives to stand a reasonable chance of being met. While state-owned power companies (SPCs) are the dominant firm type in the global electricity sector, representing nearly two thirds of global electric power generation capacity, most climate policy literature focuses on private sector companies when analyzing decarbonization interventions. SPCs’ distinct corporate governance structures, objectives, relationships with government, and sources of finance, however, can be markedly different from those of private companies. Here, we develop a framework for analyzing the extent to which common and divergent features of SPCs, and the markets in which they operate, affect their relationship to government interventions on decarbonization. We also consider the implications of these relationships for the effective implementation of sector-wide decarbonization strategies. We then apply this framework using a comparative case study analysis of six major SPCs, and highlight how differences in their agency, motivation, capacity, and market exposure may result in different potential responsiveness to government regulatory, policy and market interventions on decarbonization. We generalize these findings by developing four SPC archetypes and illustrate how they might respond differently to government interventions targeting decarbonization. Our analysis posits that SPCs can, under the guidance of governments pursuing ambitious climate policy, be more effective vehicles for decarbonization relative to private sector companies, particularly when they operate with a high degree of operational independence, are insulated from competitive pressures, and have the financial and technical capacity to invest in the decarbonization of their asset base. Similarly, market-wide policy interventions, such as carbon pricing mechanisms, could in practice be less effective interventions with respect to SPCs than their private counterparts when the SPC is ill-equipped to translate these incentives into decarbonization action because it is mandated to pursue supplementary objectives other than profit maximization alone. Ultimately, governments will need to step up their climate action to achieve carbon neutrality. SPCs can, and where they are major market players, must be key actors in driving decarbonization when the appropriate interventions are utilized and therefore deserve significantly more attention in the climate policy debate.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableNational COVID debts: climate change imperils countries' ability to repay(Nature Research, 2021-04-06)Analysis reveals three ways to boost green investment and achieve a resilient recovery from the coronavirus pandemic.