Events

The Faustian Pact in International Law by Edwin Bikundo provides an original and captivating perspective on international law and Giorgio Agamben’s work through an aesthetic-textual approach. Featuring deft and insightful close readings of drama (Goethe’s Faust), prose fiction (Melville’s Bartleby and Benito Cereno) and lyric (Laudes Regiae, Handel’s ‘The Lord is a Man of War’, Edwin Starr’s ‘War’, Boy George’s ‘War Song’), the book provides a fresh take on critical legal theory which creates a cutting-edge fusion: critico-cultural legal study. Attentive to language, plot, theme, context and characterisation, these readings are tied together by the ‘golden thread’ of critical theory running throughout and turning, in particular, on the work of Agamben, Schmitt and Kantorowicz, all mobilised to navigate and negotiate the relationship between law and the aesthetic. This hybrid seminar hosted by the UNSW Centre for Criminology, Law and Justice (CCLJ) will take place in person at the UNSW Law & Justice Building (Staff Common Room, Level 2) and online via Zoom.

Domestic Violence Death Reviews (DVDRs) currently operate in a number of countries worldwide. Established in response to concerns about high rates of domestic violence fatalities, these bodies retrospectively examine the circumstances of domestic violence-related deaths, with the aim of improving system responses to domestic violence in particular localities or jurisdictions. In this presentation, leading US expert Professor Neil Websdale examines the development and future of domestic violence death reviews worldwide.

Join the book's authors as well as a panel of guest speakers to learn more about this important publication. This hybrid seminar will take place in-person at the UNSW Law & Justice Building (Law Theatre G23) and online via Zoom. Drinks and nibbles will be served afterwards (Level 1 Foyer/Balcony) for those attending in person. Please indicate your attendance preference on checkout.

Earlier this year the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Palestine, Francesca Albanese’s report highlighted how expanding and multilayered forms of confinement in Palestine impacts children acutely. The Report identifies that while in-person confinement is the most prevalent form of deprivation of liberty imposed on Palestinians, physical, bureaucratic and digital architectures generate further restriction spatially and psychologically. An expanded carcerality, made of an array of laws, procedures and technologies of coercive confinement, transforms the occupied Palestinian territory into a constantly surveilled open-air panopticon. This, Albanese finds, generates greater vulnerability of some groups especially children who are treated as equivalent to adults by the law. Click to watch a recording of Albanese's talk.

Join the book's authors as well as a panel of guest speakers to learn more about this important publication. This hybrid seminar will take place in-person at the UNSW Law & Justice Building (Law Theatre G23) and online via Zoom. Drinks and nibbles will be served afterwards (Level 1 Foyer/Balcony) for those attending in person. Please indicate your attendance preference on checkout.

For some time, restorative justice has been promoted as a radically different and seemingly better approach to violation than conventional criminal justice. However, there is a disconnect between that promise and the way in which restorative justice is both conceptualised and applied in practice. In part, the reason for this failure is that restorative justice has failed to develop an adequate account of what it is really about all the way down. In this paper, I seek to address this gap by setting up a contrast between an ethically real conception of restorative justice—what I call ‘reconciliatory restorative justice’—and ‘legal restorative justice’.

In this seminar, Dr Emma Russell (La Trobe) and Dr Poppy de Souza (UNSW) map out the conceptual framework for their current book project, ‘Sensing the Carceral State’, and share preliminary analyses from two working chapters. The book seeks to develop a multidisciplinary, anti-carceral and decolonial framework to understand how space and the senses are integral to the organised violence and contemporary transformations of the carceral state. Experimenting with creative methodologies, the chapters of the book examine a range of different sites and practices through the lenses of space and the sensory, including racialised policing, prison construction, and resistance to the mobile border.

Australia has long grappled with how to treat refugees, particularly children, who come to our country. Cruel Care: A History of Children at our Borders asks why Australia pursues such unforgiving immigration policies, and why successive Australian governments say that the cruel acts they perpetrate are a form of care. This hybrid seminar co-hosted by the UNSW Centre for Crime, Law and Justice (CCLJ), the Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law, and the Forced Migration Research Network will take place in person at the UNSW Law & Justice Building and online via Zoom.

Cybercrime remains a puzzle. While human societies are in the midst of a Digital Revolution that is proving as transformative and disruptive as the two Industrial Revolutions that preceded it, the complex problem of how to safeguard new emerging techno-social assemblages against a broad range of manufactured online risks and harms proves extremely challenging. This presentation from Professor Benoît Dupont (Université de Montréal) proposes to adopt an ecological approach to analyze the cybercrime ecosystem and its interdependencies.

In this seminar, guest speaker Professor Benjamin Goold re-examines some of the key accounts of police discretion that have dominated the sociological and criminological literature on police decision-making since the 1960s. In particular, it considers whether it is true to say that broad, largely unsupervised discretion remains an inescapable apart of the modern police work, and asks whether that discretion - and its relationship to the powers and duties of the police - needs to be re-conceived with a view to subjecting it to more effective statutory regulation and oversight in countries like Australia and Canada.

This year’s CCLJ annual lecture will be delivered by renowned scholar of crime and punishment, Professor David Garland. It will be held in a hybrid format in Law Theatre G04 at UNSW (Kensington Campus) and broadcast online via Zoom – please indicate your attendance preference on the registration page.

Human rights and criminal justice advocates have increasingly called for the radical rethinking and abolition of traditional criminal punishment and carceral systems. This event will bring domestic and international experts on criminal justice and human rights together to discuss the “what?”, the “why?”, and the “how?” of abolitionism in a human rights context. The UNSW Centre for Crime, Law & Justice and the Australian Human Rights Institute invite you to an event on 'Human Rights and Abolitionism', to be held in hybrid format in the Law & Justice Building (level two staff common room) and online via Zoom.

In the recent UK legislative proliferation of civil orders with criminal consequences, the stated aim has been the anticipation of wrongdoing and thus prevention of harm. Despite limited evidence of the success of this regulatory form, preventive hybrid procedures have featured in all manner of recently passed and proposed legislation. This hybrid seminar, presented by Professor Jen Hendry (University of Leeds) hosted by the UNSW Centre for Crime, Law and Justice (CCLJ) will take place in-person at the UNSW Law & Justice Building (level 2 boardroom) and online via Microsoft Teams.

How do individuals engaging in public protest or experiencing housing insecurity make use of the material environment? This talk by Professor Alison Young (UoM) draws from a research project on spatial justice and public space to examine illicit adaptation of the built environment in four sites in Melbourne, Australia. Everyday urban places are composed of myriad ‘small things’ acted upon as affordances for survival within structures of silencing and dispossession for the urban ‘undercommons’.