Legal space and legal geography have been important focuses of research in socio-legal scholarship in recent years. In what ways has the experience of public space been transformed under the pressures of neoliberal ideology and contemporary governmentality? How has bio-politics and securitisation changed the materiality of public space and with what impacts on democratic life? How has COVID-19 constrained, revealed, or accelerated these processes? What are the opportunities or challenges facing us?

The ANU Centre for Law Arts and Humanities has assembled a panel of world-class interdisciplinary scholars to reflect on these questions and to talk about their research—historical, theoretical, and experiential—at the intersection of law, power, and public space.

• Margaret Davies is Matthew Flinders Distinguished Professor at Flinders University, and the author of Law Unlimited: Materialism, Pluralism and Legal Theory (2017).
  • View Margaret's abstract here.
• Chris Butler teaches at Griffith Law School and is the author of Henri Lefebvre: Spatial Politics, Everyday Life and the Right to the City (2012)/
  • View Chris' abstract here.
• Desmond Manderson is Director of the Centre for Law Arts and Humanities at ANU and has recently written on imaginaries of public space from the Renaissance to neoliberalism (2020)

This session is part of ‘For One Day Only: Law, Space, Matter’, a 24-hour virtual workshop for a non-travelling global audience organised by the Institute for Interdisciplinary Legal Studies, University of Lucerne, and the Centre for Law, Arts and Humanities, The Australian National University. View the full program.