Publication Prizes
Penny Pether Prize
LLHAA Publication Prizes
Book Prize Award
LSAANZ Publication Prizes
Scholarly article or book chapter
LSAANZ Publication Prizes
Early Career Researcher
LSAANZ Publication Prizes
Tuesday 3 December
5pm [more]
Friday 6 December
5pm [more]
Friday 6 December
5pm [more]
Friday 6 December
5pm [more]
Publication prizes will be presented prior to plenary sessions.
An Author meets Reader session for the Penny Pether Prize and LSAANZ Book Prize Award will be held at the respective conference dinners.
Law, Literature and the Humanities Association of Australasia Penny Pether Prize
Penny Pether (1957-2013) was an Australian scholar whose passionate life-long commitment to interdisciplinary legal research pervaded every aspect of her teaching and academic life. She helped convene the first conference of the Law and Literature Association and founded the interdisciplinary journal Law Text Culture. Penny was a mentor to younger academics and graduate students in the field. She held, demanded, and advocated the highest standards of interdisciplinary scholarly endeavor.
The Penny Pether Prize reflects and honours Dr Pether’s commitment to academic excellence. The Prize recognises authors whose book has made a significant contribution to the field of Australasian law, literature and humanities scholarship. It was first awarded in 2013 and has been awarded on a biennial basis.
The winners, who will be announced in advance on the Law Literature and the Humanities Association of Australasia website, will be awarded during the conference, before the Plenary session on Tuesday 3 December at 5pm. An Author Meets Reader session will then take place at the conference dinner on Tuesday 3 December.
For more information, visit: www.lawlithum.org/penny-pether-prize.
Law and Society Association of Australia and New Zealand Annual Publication Awards
The Law and Society Association of Australia and New Zealand (LSAANZ) issues three Annual Publication Awards every year: (1) For a published scholarly book/monograph; (2) For a published scholarly article or book chapter; (3) To an early career researcher for a work in either category.
The Prizes will be awarded at the conference, before the Plenary session on Friday 6 December at 5pm. An Author Meets Reader session will then take place at the conference dinner on Friday 6 December.
Full information about the publication prizes is available at www.lsaanz.org/prizes-and-grants.
Book Prize award
Law and the Dead: Technology, Relations and Institutions (Routledge, 2019)
Author: Dr Marc Trabsky, La Trobe University
Reader: Associate Professor Penny Crofts
The governance of the dead in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries gave rise to a new arrangement of thanato-politics in the West. Legal, medical and bureaucratic institutions developed innovative technologies for managing the dead, maximising their efficacy and exploiting their vitality.
Law and the Dead writes a history of their institutional life in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. With a particular focus on the technologies of the death investigation process, including place-making, the forensic gaze, bureaucratic manuals, record-keeping and radiography, this book examines how the dead came to be incorporated into legal institutions in the modern era. Drawing on the writings of philosophers, historians and legal theorists, it offers tools for thinking through how the dead dwell in law, how their lives persist through the conduct of office, and how coroners assume responsibility for taking care of the dead. This historical and interdisciplinary book offers a provocative challenge to conventional thinking about the sequestration of the dead in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It asks the reader to think through and with legal institutions when writing a history of the dead, and to trace the important role assumed by coroners in the governance of the dead.
This book will be of interest to scholars working in law, history, sociology and criminology.
Law and the Dead Discount Flyer [pdf 2.7mb]

Dr Marc Trabsky
Dr Marc Trabsky is a Senior Lecturer at La Trobe Law School and the Deputy Director of the Centre for Health Law and Society, La Trobe University.
He writes in the intersections of legal theory, history and the humanities. Marc’s research examines the theoretical, historical and institutional arrangements of law and death.
His most recent monograph is titled Law and the Dead: Technology, Relations and Institutions (Routledge, 2019).
Published scholarly article or book chapter Award
Of protest, the commons, and customary rights: an ancient tale of the lawful forest’ (2019) 42(1) University of New South Wales Law Journal 26-59.
Authors: Dr Cristy Clark and Associate Professor John Page, Southern Cross University
This article explores an ancient tale of customary public rights that starts and ends with the landmark decision of Brown v State of Tasmania (2017). In Brown, Australia’s highest court recognised a public right to protest in forests. Harking back 800 years to the limits of legal memory, and the Forest Charter of 1217, this right is viewed through the metaphor of the lawful forest, a relational notion of property at the margins of legal orthodoxy. Inherent to this tale is the tension that pits private enclosure against the commons, a contest that endures across time and place – from 13th century struggles against the Norman legal forest, through to modern claims of rights to the city.

Dr Cristy Clark
Cristy Clark is a legal scholar whose research focuses on legal geography, the commons, and the intersection of human rights, neoliberalism, activism, and the environment. She has a long standing interest in water, including the human right to water, the legal personhood of rivers, and Indigenous water values.

Associate Professor John Page
John Page is a critical property scholar whose research explores the diversity of modern property, and its convergences with public space, urban design and the materiality and idea of place. He is the author of Property Diversity and Its Implications (Routledge, 2017), and his work has appeared in journals such as Ecology Law Quarterly, Griffith Law Review, the New Zealand Universities Law Review, and the University of NSW Law Journal. John is an Associate Professor and Deputy Dean (Research) at the School of Law & Justice at Southern Cross University.
Early Career Researcher Award
Place-based income management legislation: impacts on food security’ (2018) 20(1) Flinders Law Journal 1-54.
Author: Liesel Spencer, Western Sydney University
The article reports on the findings of empirical field research into the impact of ‘place-based income management’ (PBIM) legislation on food security for trial participants in the trial site of Bankstown, NSW. The research aims to address a gap in existing evaluative data on the effects of PBIM on the lives of trial participants. PBIM is a form of welfare quarantining or ‘cashless welfare’. PBIM trial participants can access only a limited number of retail food outlets using the compulsory ‘BasicsCard’. Findings of this research include that PBIM is neither genuinely ‘place-based’ legislation, nor does it improve food security for participants in the Bankstown trial site. The shops which do accept the BasicsCard are more expensive than those which do not. Bankstown has high ethnic, language and religious diversity, and a high number of migrant and humanitarian entrants, reflected in a vibrant food culture and streetscape. However, for PBIM trial participants, the bulk of Bankstown’s rich food landscape is effectively ‘greyed out’ and inaccessible. The legislation is complicit in constraining access to the economic, social and cultural aspects of food security for a group of people who are already marginalised and vulnerable.
search.informit.com.au/documentSummary;dn=985788734956130;res=IELHSS

Liesel Spencer
Liesel Spencer is a Senior Lecturer and Director of Research in the School of Law at the Western Sydney University.
Liesel’s research interests are in public health law and food systems governance. Her PhD took a comparative law and legal geographical approach to analysing the food security and public health impacts of Australia’s place-based income management trial, and the US suite of food welfare law and policy. Liesel has also published research on the public and environmental health implications of urban agriculture, and on aspects of local government law as public health regulation.