School of Law and Justice

University of Southern Queensland

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Empowering Future Leaders: Join the Student-Focused Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Law Students Meet the Profession Event

01/09/2023 / / 0 Comments

Are you a law student with a passion for making a difference? Are you curious about the legal profession and eager to connect with like-minded peers? Look no further! We are thrilled to introduce you to an inspiring event that puts students at the forefront: the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Law Students Meet the Profession. This unique gathering is designed exclusively for law students who identify as Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander, and it’s an opportunity you won’t want to miss.

Event Details:

  • Date: Thursday, 14 September, 2023
  • Time: 5.30pm to 8.00pm | Panel discussion starts at 6.00pm
  • Location: Bond Brisbane – 433 Boundary Street, Spring Hill, Brisbane
  • Event Link: Event Link

Empowering Students, Forging Connections:
This event is all about putting students first. As a law student of Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander descent, your journey is unique, and your perspective is invaluable. The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Law Students Meet the Profession event offers you the chance to network with professionals, engage in meaningful conversations, and gain insights into the legal landscape that will shape your future.

Why Attend?

  1. Networking Opportunities: Connect with experienced legal professionals who share your cultural background and who are committed to supporting your journey in the legal field. This is a rare chance to establish connections that could pave the way for mentorship and future collaborations.
  2. Interactive Discussions: Engage in panel discussions and Q&A sessions led by respected legal experts. Gain firsthand knowledge of the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead and gather advice on navigating the complexities of the profession.
  3. Personal Empowerment: Discover stories of success and perseverance from accomplished Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander legal practitioners. Their journeys will inspire you to overcome obstacles and pursue your ambitions with confidence.
  4. Community Building: Forge lifelong friendships and connections with fellow law students who share your heritage. Build a support network that will walk beside you throughout your academic and professional journey.

Your Voice Matters:
At the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Law Students Meet the Profession event, your voice matters. This is an inclusive space where you can openly discuss your experiences, ask questions, and express your aspirations. You’ll find a community that celebrates your cultural identity and encourages you to succeed.

How to Register:
Ready to be part of this transformative experience? Registering for the event is easy. Simply visit the event link and secure your spot today. Remember, spaces are limited, so don’t wait too long to secure your place among future legal leaders.

Final Thoughts:
The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Law Students Meet the Profession event is a celebration of diversity, empowerment, and education. As a student-centered event, it’s designed to uplift and inspire law students like you who have a passion for justice and equality. Join us for an evening that promises to be enlightening, engaging, and, most importantly, focused on your growth and success. We can’t wait to welcome you and witness the incredible connections and experiences that will unfold.

Mark your calendar, spread the word, and get ready to take your journey in law to the next level. We’ll see you at the event!

Call for Papers: Theology and Jurisprudence Symposium at UniSQ

11/08/2023 / / 0 Comments

The School of Law and Justice at the University of Southern Queensland will be hosting the Theology and Jurisprudence Symposium at the Toowoomba Campus on Friday 9 February 2024.

 
 

Theme

This annual symposium focuses on the relationship between theology and jurisprudence. Jurisprudence typically purports to provide a non-theistic account of ‘law’. However, foundational to many theories of law is some kind of theology.

Natural law, of course, is deeply influenced by its theological articulation through Thomas Aquinas and even modern ‘secular’ theories of natural law retain vestiges of this influence. The main proponents of legal positivism (such as Thomas Hobbes and John Austin) often engaged with different aspects of Christian theology.

Altarpiece in Ascoli Piceno, Italy,
by Carlo Crivelli (15th century)
Portrait of John Calvin (1509–1564) / PD
Law Professor John Finnis..Photo by Matt Cashore/University of Notre Dame

Moreover, theological influences on legal theory are not limited to Christianity; jurisprudential viewpoints around the world have been shaped by a broad range of theological traditions. The tendency of jurisprudence to ground itself in some kind of theology is not surprising given its need for an ontological foundation for legal authority.

This symposium aims to consider jurisprudence from a variety of theological standpoints and critically examine the reliance of diverse theories of law on theological perspectives. 

Call for Papers

We invite papers that consider the prevailing theological assumptions of legal theories; unpack the different streams of jurisprudence from a theological perspective; explore how theology tends to define and undergird theories of law; or consider any other issues which engage both theology and jurisprudence.

Presenters are required to submit written papers (which can be works-in-progress) for distribution to the other symposium participants by 1 February 2024. The finalised papers may be considered for publication in a special journal issue or edited book. 

Submissions

Abstracts of 100–200 words should be submitted by email to Professor Jonathan Crowe (Jonathan.Crowe@usq.edu.au) no later than 1 November 2023. Successful applicants will be notified by the end of November. 

Whip Use in Horse Racing

10/03/2023 / / 0 Comments
Courtesy of Pixabay
By Aaron Timoshanko

At the end of last year, I was fortunate to have an article titled ‘Could existing anticruelty laws ban whip use in horse racing?’ published in the Adelaide Law Review. More recently, I was interviewed on the Adelaide Law Review podcast, where we discussed some of my article’s background and broader implications.

Adelaide Law Review podcast

The article aimed to investigate whether industry-compliant whip use in horse racing breaches existing animal cruelty laws.

This question has been of interest to me for some time and was one of the reasons I decided to do a PhD. My PhD ultimately took a different path, but I could not find a satisfactory answer to this question during my reading in animal law/animal protection scholarship. I know, for example, that if I whipped my dog Lucy (sorry, Lucy!) to make her run faster, I could (and would likely) be prosecuted by the RSPCA.

So why aren’t jockeys in a horse race prosecuted?

There are many ways to answer this question, from the philosophical (as property, animal interests are not recognised by the legal system) to the more practical.

I took the latter approach. There is, however, no reported case (that I found) involving whipping a horse during a horse race that was compliant with industry standards. Because there is no case law ruling whether industry-compliant whip use was animal cruelty, I turned to principles of statutory interpretation.

By ‘industry-compliant’ whip use, I refer to the Australian Rules of Racing and the Local Rules of Racing, which permit using so-called ‘padded whips’ within specific parameters. So, I acknowledge that if a jockey was to whip a horse in the stables, then there is a good chance that the RSPCA might prosecute — whether the RSPCA would is the subject of another article.

But, my article seeks to answer whether a jockey could be prosecuted for animal cruelty for whipping a horse in compliance with the Rules of Racing.

Using the ‘always speaking’ approach to statutory interpretation, I argue that it is theoretically possible for a court to interpret the words of qualification in the animal cruelty provisions as extending to industry-compliant whip use based on new scientific evidence that horse skin is more sensitive than previously believed.

So, why hasn’t there been a prosecution for industry-compliant whip use? As I cite in the article, recent scientific evidence debunks the myth that horses’ skin is thicker than humans. Instead, the evidence suggests that from an anatomical perspective, horses’ skin is just as sensitive, if not possibly more sensitive, than human skin.

I argue that three constitutional and contextual considerations will likely sway a court in considering whether industry-compliant whip use could constitute animal cruelty.

Consequences of interpretation

This means that courts may consider the consequences of a particular statutory interpretation before adopting a specific meaning. For example, this was done by the High Court of Australia in Project Blue Sky. The majority found that ‘[e]xpense, inconvenience and loss of investor confidence’ would flow from a particular interpretation. Based on these potential consequences, the majority decided to take an interpretation that avoided the adverse effects identified.

Presumption against retrospectivity

It is presumed that legislation won’t operate retrospectively unless there are clear words to this effect.

This is for excellent reasons — it offends people’s sense of fairness if they did something that was lawful at the time but later determined to be unlawful.

This is what I think could be at issue if a court was to interpret the words of qualification in the way I previously put forward — basically, a jockey would be whipping their horse on the widespread belief that this is legal (providing they are doing so per the rules of racing).

Generally, where there is an alternative interpretation open to the court that does not involve retrospectivity, the court will take it — especially in criminal law matters, of which the animal welfare legislation is classified.

Separation of powers

While the common law is an important and valuable source of law, deciding on the lawfulness of an activity is the proper responsibility of a democratically accountable Parliament. It would therefore breach the separation of powers in the Constitution if Courts decided questions of whether certain activities (previously thought to be lawful) should now be unlawful — especially controversial activities such as the whipping of horses for entertainment.

I believe these three considerations explain why we haven’t and are unlikely to see a prosecution for industry-compliant whip use despite the research suggesting padded whips cause horses pain, possibly significant pain.

This does not suggest that the judiciary cannot use the ‘always speaking’ approach to extend existing statutory words and phrases in legislation. But, whether industry-compliant whip use breaches animal cruelty laws, this would require a level of judicial activism that is very unlikely until more people in society change their relationship with animals. And by that time, the Parliament would have probably changed the laws.

You can read the full article here. I hope you find it interesting and thought-provoking.

Fountain pen on black lined paper

Opinion: Grant worship is damaging the humanities

21/10/2022 / / 0 Comments
By Dr Jeremy Patrick, Senior Lecturer, University of Southern Queensland

In the past two decades, many Australian universities have made dramatic shifts in how they recognise research. Often, these shifts are in direct response to government incentives.  There have been periods where the sheer quantity of peer-reviewed research was the goal, periods where only “Q1” publications were deemed valuable, periods where “impact and engagement” looked to be the next big thing, and more.  Most recently, the only thing that really seems to matter is research income—grants.  Any academic discipline within a university that can’t show major grant income could be punished by mediocre (or worse) ratings in ERA rankings, leading many universities to respond by explicitly building research income into the evaluation of individual academics when it comes to matters like promotion and workload allocation for research.

It may be plausible to argue that this focus on research income is warranted for the sciences.  Cutting-edge research in medicine, physics, agriculture, engineering, and related fields isn’t done well on the cheap.  In a field where a single piece of laboratory equipment could cost hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars, every dollar that comes into a university via external research income helps build capacity for future research success.

But—at least for now—universities are more than just STEM research institutes.  The humanities have been poorly served by this new worship of grant success as the be all and end all of what makes a good researcher.  At my university, a former research director once remarked: “It’s not like anyone does research sitting in their office anymore.”  He had a science background, and I can’t comment on whether or not that’s true in STEM.  But for the humanities, I can attest that many of us do perform most of our research sitting behind a desk.  In law, the doctrinal methodology of synthesising case law and evaluating legal rules is still foremost in the discipline’s legal journals.  A literature scholar looking at portrayals of gender in the works of EM Forster or a political scientist labouring over census data to analyse voting patterns also (probably) don’t need hundreds of thousands of dollars in grant income in order to do good work and publish in the best outlets. 

The distorting effect comes when universities adopt a “one size fits all” approach and evaluate scholars in the humanities by exactly the same criteria that it evaluates scholars in the sciences.  Although grants do exist in the humanities, they do so at only fraction of the number and dollar value available for the sciences.  More so, many particular disciplines in the humanities have a very different approach to scholarship than the sciences: we don’t usually put fifteen names on a five-page article, track prestige by citation count, “partner with industry,” or join established research teams as doctoral students.  There is a fundamental difference in kind that needs to be recognised, and policies that fail to do so (for administrative simplicity or a false equality) are deeply problematic.

Grant worship has a more fundamental flaw, however.  Universities have begun to lose sight of what grants are: a means to an end.  Grants are an input, not an output.  The ability to wheedle money out of the ARC or some corporation is certainly a skill, but it’s not necessarily the same skillset of what we traditionally value in scholars—the ability to contribute to knowledge.   In the past several years, we’ve begun to value the mere obtaining of money for research far more than the actual research itself.  We’ve gotten to the point, even in the humanities, where winning a grant to write a book is celebrated (and rewarded internally) far more than the actual writing and publishing of the book.  And those scholars who publish regularly without having to resort to grant money?  They are, by (new) definition, simply not very good researchers—despite their output constituting the vast majority of total research output.  The incentive now is to apply for grants just for the sake of getting the prestige of getting the grant, regardless of whether or not the money is actually necessary or the project is one that the academic is genuinely interested in.  And, of course, for the humanities there are so few grant opportunities that all the futile time invested in making repeated applications could probably have been better spent doing actual research.

In this new world for the humanities, “publish or perish” has become “fund-raise or perish.”  Though, to be fair, “perish” probably just means being “punished” by additional teaching loads instead of research time, along with a permanent relegation to the bottom ranks of the academic ladder.  It still beats digging ditches, of course.  But universities need to have a more realistic view of what scholars in the humanities do, and how unrealistic it is to expect more than a handful of us to win significant research income.

We acknowledge the traditional custodians of the lands on which the University of Southern Queensland stands.

USQ is a member of the Regional Universities Network. CRICOS: QLD 00244B, NSW 02225M. TEQSA: PRV12081

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