Professor Desmond Manderson FAAL, FASSA, FRSC

ANU College of Law, Bld 6, Fellows Rd, Acton ACT 2600

Research Theme
Research Centre
Research interests
Appointments
- ARC Future Fellow
- Professor, ANU College of Law and ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences
- Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada
- Founding Director (2008-2011), Institute for the Public Life of Arts & Ideas, McGill Univ. Montreal
- Editorial Boards: Law Text Culture; Macquarie Law Journal; Law & Literature; Law, Culture and Humanities; Studies in Law, Politics, and Society
View more publications on the ANU Researchers website
Recent news
In the Media
Past events
Written by Professor Carolyn Strange, The Death Penalty and Sex Murder in Canadian History provides an incisive analysis of responses to sex murders and the shifting politics of the death penalty.
This webinar series seeks to address the new meaning, scope and representation of surveillance in the time of COVID-19 and initiate a conversation between arts, humanities and the various fields which surveillance is used.
Send in your papers for a Zoominar series, hosted by the Institute for Postcolonial Studies, consisting of four monthly panels, each dedicated to exploring the metaphors we survive by. If you are interested in participating, please send an abstract to the convenors, no later than 6 July 2020.
This event explores the role and responsibilities of universities in these urgent times. It matters not just to scholars, administrators and students – but to everyone concerned about adaptation and change in the 21st century. The event will be broadcast to the public – and will anchor refreshed internal
dialogue at ANU during the year in which its world-leading law school turns 60.
Please note, only a small selection of recent publications and activities are listed below.
View more publications on the ANU Researchers website
Currently supervising
-
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)Topic: Performing sovereignty: How to make a refugee disappear with legal magic My PhD dissertation looks at how sovereignty iterates, presents and reifies itself in the Australian refugee context. In Australia, refugees can be detained without reasons for the decision...
Research interests
Current courses
Year | Course code | Course name |
---|---|---|
2021 |
LAWS4286 Class #4276 |
Literature, Law and Human Rights |
Previous courses
Year | Course code | Course name |
---|---|---|
2020 |
LAWS4309 Class #4679 |
Colonialism & the rule of law |
2020 |
LAWS4231 Class #9166 |
Law and Art: Representation and Critique |
How my works connects with public policy
There is a crisis in law today. At best we think of it as a technical power imposed on society that tells us what to do. At worst we think of it as fundamentally unjust and corrupt. We can address this crisis by improving our processes of law-making and law-enforcing. But we can also address this crisis by radically shifting how we think about law – what it is and how it relates to us and to the rest of our lives. What if law was not just ‘out there’ like a machine; but ‘in here’ like a person or a memory? What if law was not just made by lawyers and politicians – but a product of all of us through how we thought, saw, and spoke about it?
One of the most innovative areas of legal scholarship in recent years has been law and the humanities. Its goal is to re-connect law to its roots in the humanities: in history, the arts, literature, philosophy. By studying how law is represented culturally in our society, we can gain crucial insights into its origins, its functions, and its problems. We can give to law a relevance that it often seems to lack – by taking seriously ideas of law and justice in the work of Plato or Shakespeare and equally on the screen, on the box and on the web. And we can give back to law a sense of its ethical and human dimensions – breaking down that sense of law as a coercive (even amoral) system outside of us and unrelated to us and encouraging instead a more engaged social dialogue about what we mean by responsibility and tolerance in the modern world.
- Does law have a history and why does that matter?
- Does justice have a philosophy and if so what is it?
- Does literature tell us about law and with what effect?
- Does TV?
- Does art?
- Does music?
- Is justice a fact or an idea or a feeling? Is law? Is authority?
- Is law more than the sum of its parts—or less?