The report is written with the view that the workshops and the lessons drawn from them can aid in providing a community engagement model for other residential groups in different localities as well as for other community projects with different social groups. With this aim in mind, the hope is to encourage the completion of the project as envisaged which involves a comprehensive approach to civil participation, conflict management and constructive communication involving all sectors of civil society.

The report outlines the approach taken to the workshops and their outcomes and some of the challenges for communities who feel excluded and who may not have had positive experiences or training in how to navigate complex systems and have conversations. It makes some recommendations and outlines some of the lessons learned by all.

The workshops achieved the overall goal of the ‘Creating Right Spaces’ project: of benefiting people with the least access to justice and community development to voice their concerns and learn some skills that could be helpful to them. This was achieved on a small scale and yet this project demonstrates how beneficial such a program can be as well as the importance of it being a continuing project. “One off” funding misses the opportunity for ongoing recurrent work. Continued support is necessary if any real gains are to be made to ensure behaviour change and ongoing skills development and to ensure that the work can transcend often fixed negative patterns of behaviour and give people the capacity to generate real, long lasting and sustainable positive change.

The extraordinary richness of the interactions that arose in the workshops occurred not just from the stories shared and the skills learnt together but, in the words of the residents, from the growing awareness of how the strength of a community comes from within the community itself and its ability to organise, support and respect its members as well as learn more about creating better relationship and engagements. There was individual and collective growth which involved rekindling a sense of being worthy of happiness, opportunities, and a better future – and this happened because the group itself supported each person to take risks, acknowledged each other’s strengths and weaknesses, and demonstrated honesty, respect and gratitude.

First of all, may I congratulate Chuo University on its 125th anniversary. In the modern age, a time of rapid and relentless change, institutions of such longevity are rare. Begun in 1885 as the English Law School – Igirisu Horitsu Gakko – by 18 young attorneys and scholars led by Rokuichiro Masujima, the establishment of what is now Chuo University followed the establishment of a number of other private law schools, all responding to a perceived need to increase the legal training and professionalism of Japan’s judges and prosecutors. Given the close relationship between Japan and England at the time (despite the role of US Commodore Perry in the opening up of Japan to the world some 30 years earlier), the founders of Chuo University looked particularly to English law, and were evidently impressed by the ‘practical application’ and ‘flexibility’ of the precedent-based analogical reasoning of the common law. Historians have tended to characterise the spread of English law throughout the world in the 19th century as largely the result of colonial imposition, as in the case of India, or colonial settlement, as in the case of Australia, but the example of the founding of Chuo University reminds us that it sometimes happened by choice.

However, with the advent of the Meiji Constitution and a number of civil codes, Japanese law could not be ignored, and in 1889, the English Law School became the Tokyo College of Law – Tokyo Hogakuin – and, soon after, the first issue of what is now the Chuo Law Review – Hogaku Shipo – appeared. After a further name change in 1903 to the Tokyo University of Law – Tokyo Hogakuin Daigaku – the name of Chuo, meaning ‘middle’ or ‘central’, was adopted in 1905. I understand that there is some uncertainty about whether this was because some of the founders had attended Middle Temple in England, or because of the university’s central location, or indeed whether it reflected some concept of the middle ground in scholarship. No doubt the destruction of documentary records in the great fires of 1892, 1917 and 1923 has made definitive resolution of this question difficult.

Against the background of the political swing from social liberalism to neoliberalism in Australia, this essay considers the discomfiting relationship between feminism and the legal academy over the last three decades. It briefly traces the trajectory of the liaison, the course of the brief affair, the parting of the ways and the cold shoulder. In considering the reasons for the retreat from feminism, it is suggested that it has been engineered by neoliberalism through the market’s deployment of third wave feminism, particularly the popular manifestation of girlpower. The focus on promotion of the self, consumerism, free choice and sexuality has deflected attention away from collective harms. Girlpower has also facilitated a revival of gendered binarisms on the social script, which does not bode well for the future of women in the legal profession. The proposition is illustrated by reference to the represention of women’s breasts on the cover of a law students’ magazine containing articles on sexed crime.

Preliminary results from our study of law student wellbeing at the Australian National University are consistent with results of studies in the US and elsewhere in Australia, suggesting that law students may begin to experience increased psychological distress, including symptoms of depression, in the first year of law school. In light of this evidence, the particular challenge facing legal education is to look at the study of law itself and examine how the pedagogy, substance, and approach of legal education impact students’ self concept and well-being. This paper begins that task by exploring the formation of professional identity in law school.

In making decisions about legal content, materials, and pedagogy, legal educators (often unconsciously) adopt and communicate assumptions about professional identity that may be outmoded, incomplete, and inappropriate for the students’ futures as legal professionals. The typical law school curriculum offers a conception of the lawyer identity that is impoverished by legal education’s over-emphasis on adversarialism, detached analysis, and competitive individualism. Each of these factors may contribute to undermining students’ sense of values, feelings of power and competence, and general sense of wellbeing. Students’ exposure to this inadequate formulation of professional identity comes at a critically important time in the formation of their identities, a time when we, as educators, ought to be particularly sensitive to the messages we send.

We encourage legal educators to correct the distorting effects of a poor conception of the legal professional identity by encouraging the development of key aspects of personality, such as empathy, that are currently under-emphasised in legal education. We also argue that by improving the ways in which the law school environment fosters resilience, legal educators will contribute to their students’ current and future well-being and to the revitalisation of the profession.

This chapter explores a few of the contexts and the defences for women who kill in Australia. Focusing on battered women who kill, women with PMS and women with post-partum depression, we examine what lawyers should look for in the cases, how to communicate with their clients most effectively to identify whether these background variables were present, possible pleas to argue, and how best to help the Court to hear the women’s case.

Against the background of the political swing from social liberalism to neoliberalism in Australia, this essay considers the discomfiting relationship between feminism and the legal academy over the last three decades. It briefly traces the trajectory of the liaison, the course of the brief affair, the parting of the ways and the cold shoulder. In considering the reasons for the retreat from feminism, it is suggested that it has been engineered by neoliberalism through the market’s deployment of third wave feminism, particularly the popular manifestation of girlpower. The focus on promotion of the self, consumerism, free choice and sexuality has deflected attention away from collective harms. Girlpower has also facilitated a revival of gendered binarisms on the social script, which does not bode well for the future of women in the legal profession. The proposition is illustrated by reference to the represention of women’s breasts on the cover of a law students’ magazine containing articles on sexed crime.

This paper addresses the discourse of human rights in the Australian context. The resistance to human rights is apparent in the drafting of the Constitution and, subsequently, in attempts to enact a statutory bill of rights. The paper also considers the National Human Rights Consultation Report of 2009, noting how the political swing rightwards could damage the prospects of a federal Human Rights Act.

In this article, the author argues that the separation of sexual harassment from sex discrimination within legal and popular discourses deflects attention from systemic discrimination. The article examines a range of conduct to support the view that the closer to heterosex the harassing conduct is, the more likely it is to be accepted as sexual harassment. This corporealised focus not only individualises the conduct and detracts from the idea of women as rational knowers in authoritative positions, it also legitimises other forms of harassing conduct in the workplace. The unremitting focus on the sexual in sexual harassment therefore serves a convenient political and ideological purpose within a neo liberal climate that privileges employer prerogative over workers’ rights.

This paper concerns curriculum development for online learning in a commercial law course using a process of sustained action-research. We identify and discuss four main characteristics in this process: a need to respond to an external requirement for change (i.e. going online): one or two key guiding teaching and learning principles; an incremental, flexible timeline over three consecutive iterations; a collaborative, supportive partnership between educators and educational consultants . There were two levels of action: learning what was required for curriculum redevelopment and learning about the process of supporting educational development itself. Substantive outcomes included the: sustained adoption of the practices of active learning and curriculum alignment; conceptual development of discussion as a learning tool; acceptance of the fundamental value and practical role in developing purposeful reflection provided by a ‘critical friend.’