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]

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]

Law and the Dead: Technology, Relations and Institutions

“This book functions as a very readable and enjoyable socio-legal history of death in the West in the C18th and C19th. It deals with sombre material with a light touch, and whilst it is theoretically grounded, this is handled skillfully and does not obstruct the broader narrative. It traverses death investigation, burial, cemeteries, the office of the coroner, the origins of the morgue, and the ceremonies, practicalities, technologies, materialities and legalities they inaugurate. It does this in a way that also discloses the pressures of urbanization, urban poverty and sanitation, and also some interesting disclosure of illicit practices of dismembering, collecting and trading in human remains, including Indigenous bodies.”

Law and the Dead: Technology, Relations and Institutions

“This is a very engaging and well written book by an ECR that examines how the dead were regulated by law in the 18th and 19th centuries with a particular focus on the office of the coroner. It proposes new ways of understanding how law regulated the dead and follows how various technologies (the term being used in a broad sense) were applied in this setting.”

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.

unswlawjournal.unsw.edu.au/article/of-protest-the-commons-and-customary-public-rights-an-ancient-tale-of-the-lawful-forest/

Of protest, the commons, and customary rights: an ancient tale of the lawful forest

“This is a great article, and one which brings together legal, social, and political history, theory, and a recent court case to examine the idea that there are ancient common rights enshrined in public spaces. The article is erudite and extremely interesting in the detail it presents about the idea of the lawful forest – an apparently old but in the present context quite novel idea.”

Of protest, the commons, and customary rights: an ancient tale of the lawful forest

“This is a highly original, fascinating and complex article.”

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

Place-based income management legislation: impacts on food security

“This is a most impressive paper, notable for its depth of engagement with relevant literature, its integration and use of secondary sources of evaluative material on the basics card and food security, and the careful and creative design of primary fieldwork conducted in the Bankstown trial site. It certainly engages both law and society disciplines and the social (and legal) implications of its critical review of the welfare card program. And it certainly impresses as a well conducted evaluative study (vastly superior to the softer and less rigorous evaluations commissioned by government from private sector consultants).”

Place-based income management legislation: impacts on food security

“The projects made a strong original contribution to our understanding of income management and is a valuable addition to the literature about the treatment of beneficiaries, especially because of the novel focus on place-based income management. It delivered some fascinating data/insight.”

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.