The future of legal education

Are lawyers prepared for the future?*

At the 2014 Australasian Law Teachers' Association conference, I will be participating in a plenary panel discussing 'Creating a Better Future for Legal Education'. In this post I outline some of my thoughts on this topic, in the hope that readers might share their own views and challenge my own.

My focus here will be on where I would like legal education to go in the next 10 years, and what changes legal academics need to make now to achieve that vision. In short, in my view legal education must challenge the existing silos of doctrinal specialisation and embrace the broader context of the law. This aligns with calls to break down barriers between university disciplines themselves, to deal with the 'big problems'.

Educating the legal profession about gender

'The woman lawyer will bring justice to her profession'*

The recently released NARS Report is the latest in a long list of studies of the pervasive sexism in the legal profession. It makes a number of excellent and practical recommendations to facilitate women's engagement in legal practice and consequently their retention and advancement.

There are various arguments for the retention and advancement of women practitioners - from gender equality, to sustainability of the profession, to the administration of justice. Despite this, and the decades of recommendations on equality, the legal profession remains as sexist as ever.

This period of mounting awareness of sexism as a problem has coincided with what Thornton regards as a prevalence of the corporatized law school. This has accompanied the scaling back of the critical project as a feature of legal education, including gender perspectives in law. At the same time in higher education more broadly, women's studies as a discipline have been wound back.

In light of what seems to be an urgent issue for the profession, is it now time for legal education to integrate gender into the curriculum?

Government largess & wealth

I saw somewhere online today a criticism that the majority of Australians receive government benefits. This was presented as a means of criticising those who do as 'leaners', pointing out that a minority of Australians are 'lifters'. Interestingly, the comment aggregated those on government 'benefits' and those who received their income from government jobs (ie public servants).

I suspect that by government benefits, the author meant both welfare as well as tax concessions. The argument, presumably, is one for smaller government and the promotion of do-it-yourself wealth. This kind of discourse tends to categorise those on 'benefits' as lazy and the public service as a bloated and unnecessary workforce.

In this post I point out why this is a lazy dichotomy that supports not an economic view but an ideological one. While I have written before about the subtext of 'lifters and leaners', here I use the very interesting and seminal work of Charles Reich from 1964, The New Property.

Queensland to reintroduce gendered statutory language

On 19 March, the Queensland Attorney-General, Jarrod Bleijie, introduced the Crime and Misconduct and Other Legislation Amendment Bill 2014 to Parliament. The Bill is designed to respond to two inquiries into the working of Queensland's Crime and Misconduct Commission. The Bill has been roundly criticised - not least by Tony Fitzgerald QC, who has described it as 'a gross abuse of power'.

In this post however, I will examine the legitimacy of a lower profile change proposed by the Bill: the renaming of the head of the CMC from 'chairperson' to 'chairman'. See eg clause 35:

35 Amendment of s 224 (Qualifications for appointment as the chairperson)

(1) Section 224, heading, ‘as the chairperson’—
omit, insert—

chairman and deputy chairman

(2) Section 224, ‘chairperson if’—
omit, insert—
chairman or deputy chairman if

Women's Property

The Married Women's Property Acts made a big change...but women's property remains an exception*

I have been doing some deep reflection on the progress of my thesis. I have concluded that my thesis question seems to have suffered a little from 'drift' away from my initial goal, to something that incorporated it but was perhaps a little different.

In my last iteration, I was looking at the doctrinal incoherence of constructive trusts... Indeed I was immersed in the intricacies of why across four common law jurisdictions (Australia, Canada, New Zealand and England) the law of trusts was uniform in recognising the 'intimate partner' constructive trust - and so a means of recognising women's separate property - but so diverse in the doctrine harnessed to deal with the 'problem' of women's separate property.

I've spent this last few weeks going back to basics. What was I really trying to show? My (bigger than PhD) idea is that the notion of property is itself inappropriate to deal with contemporary issues. I think property theory, in its liberal market mould, is unsuitable for our contemporary culture (copyright), for culture in its wider sense (first nations/Indigenous peoples' customary 'title') and it is most certainly unsuitable to deal with the huge issue of the environment, including of course, climate change. My PhD thesis is about the gendered nature of property and how it upholds the economic dependence of married women (married in a legal and de facto sense).

In my view, all property does is support the creation of a new market based on the idea of atomised, separated, individuals who are 'rational profit maximisers' and are in competition and unconnected with anyone else.

I'm not anti-capitalism - I agree that markets have created the circumstances for improvement in people's lives. But there must be a balance to the greed that accompanies unaccountable, unrelated, disembodied beings who exist in the eyes of the law (and economic theory).

So I have returned, in my thesis, to the roots of the question that first engaged me. I ask: is property gendered?

Here is a prezi that embodies my present thinking about how this argument might run. I'd be interested to hear your thoughts.

*image from https://ontariorealestatesource.wordpress.com/tag/women/

Why the Great Barrier Reef should have legal standing

The Reef is under threat and needs our protection

Friday saw the announcement that the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority ('GBRMPA') had approved dumping of dredging spoil within the boundaries of the marine park. This followed the Commonwealth's go-ahead for the construction of the world's biggest coal terminal at Abbot Point, off Bowen, to facilitate mining in Queensland's coal-rich Bowen Basin.

The decisions were made in the context of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Act which, under s2A (1) apparently aims to:

provide for the long term protection and conservation of the environment, biodiversity, and heritage values of the Great Barrier Reef Region.

Despite the Minister's assurances that the decisions have been made based on 'the science' and the dumping will be subject to rigorous conditions, the very fact of the decisions by both the Commonwealth government and GBRMPA call into question the real intent of the Act.

The perils of individualism and our dystopian present

As a child, I read constantly and I read anything. Of note however, before I had reached secondary school I had been immersed in numerous novels about the Holocaust, had read Alvin Toffler's Future Shock and had spent a lot of time delving into Alicia Bay Laurel's glorious hand written and illustrated Living on the Earth.

Mine was a childhood vision of a dystopian present and a dangerous future for which I felt the need to prepare by knowing how to survive. This was accompanied by a deep sense of responsibility to be accountable for my own consumption. (A responsibility I admit that I have been only partially successful in fulfilling.)

Surrounded today by news of climate extremes, oil drilling in the Arctic, the real possibility of dredging in the Great Barrier Reef, expanding coal terminals on the reef, mining approvals over biodiverse regions such as the Galilee Basin's Brimblebox Reserve, move on powers over Queensland's bat colonies (and so on) the dangerous future I had envisaged has come to pass. And the dystopian present of the 1970s has taken a turn for the worse.

All of these decisions, in which each of us is complicit, arise out of a fundamental dislocation of our very self from our environment and indeed from society. Our governments however have failed to provide a cohesive narrative around these decisions, thus failing to see the inherent inconsistencies in their own positions.