While devoting fine attention to the stuff of everyday life, Deborah Cass was also a brilliant scholar. Although the deep sense of loss and sadness at Deborah's death remains, it is wonderful to have ...her writings as a continuing source of inspiration and consolation. In them, we continue to hear Deborah’s firm, clear voice, her appreciation of language, her seriousness, her curiosity, her sensitivity and her wry humour.’ —Professor Hilary Charlesworth This collection honours the work of Deborah Cass, 15 February 1960 – 4 June 2013, a brilliant Australian constitutional and international lawyer. Deborah studied at the University of Melbourne and Harvard Law School and taught at Melbourne Law School, The Australian National University and the London School of Economics. A member of The Australian National University’s Centre for International and Public Law from 1993 to 2000, Deborah’s work offered illuminating new perspectives in a range of fields, from the right to self-determination, critical international legal theory, and feminist legal theory to the international trade law system. The title of this edited collection draws on one of her articles, ‘Traversing the Divide: International Law and Australian Constitutional Law’ (1998) 20 Adelaide Law Review 73. This book evolves from a symposium held to draw together academics from around the globe to reflect on Deborah’s extensive scholarship and contributions to public law and international law, and to examine how her work is of value to current domestic and international law issues. The pieces selected for this volume both remind us of Deborah’s outstanding academic career and provide important insights on current public law and international law pressing issues.
'The Trailblazing Project' funded by the Australian Research Council - showcases experiences of Australia's pioneer women lawyers - diversity and history of women's rights.
The Court as Archive Ann Genovese, Trish Luker, Kim Rubenstein
ANU Press eBooks,
01/2019
eBook
Open access
"Until the late 20th century, ‘an archive’ generally meant a repository for documents, as well as the generic name for the wide range of documents the repository might hold. An archive could be ...visited, and then also searched, to discover past actions or lives that had meaning for the present. While historians and historiographers have long understood the contests that archives contain and represent, the very idea of ‘the archive’ has, over the last 40 years, become the subject and object of widening and intensified consideration. This consideration has been intellectual (from scholars in a wide range of disciplines) and public (from communities and individuals whose stories are held captive, or sometimes hidden or excluded from official archives), as well as institutional. It has involved scrutiny and critique of official archives’ limitations and practices, as well as symbolic, affective and theoretical expansion and heightened expectation of what ‘the archive’ is or should be. The very language of ‘the archive’ now carries freight as administrative practice, normative value, metaphor, description and aspiration in different ways than it did in the 20th century. This collection offers a unique contribution to these reinvigorated and sometimes new conversations about what an archive might be, what it can do as a consequence, and to whom it bears custodial responsibilities. In particular, this collection addresses what it means for contemporary Australian superior courts of record to not only have constitutional and procedural duties to documents as a matter of law, but also to acknowledge obligations to care for those materials in a way that understands their public meaning and public value for the Australian people, in the past, in the present and for the future."
While leadership is an over-used term today, how it is defined for women and the contexts in which it emerges remains elusive. Moreover, women are exhorted to exercise leadership, but occupying ...leadership positions has its challenges. Issues of access, acceptable behaviour and the development of skills to be successful leaders are just some of them.
This article adds to a growing body of literature that aims to correct the traditional lack of attention to the role of women lawyers who have exercised their power as active citizens by ...participating in legal reform and facilitating access to social justice for all Australians. The paper highlights the unique contribution to gender equality of one such woman, Eve Mahlab AO, through a close examination of her oral history, which was drawn from the pilot stage of a project that now comprises a corpus of over fifty interviews recorded with 'trailblazing' Australian women lawyers. The methodology adopted is innovative in combining a legal analysis and a discourse analysis of the interview with Eve Mahlab. This approach offers insights into those aspects of her personal and professional biography that most influenced and enabled her contributions in the public and private spheres, allowing us to publicly acknowledge and record them. The paper demonstrates how such use of oral history broadens and deepens our understanding of the diverse social and professional forces that shape political consciousness and motivate feminist engagement in civic activity.
This portrait of the global debate over patent law and access to essential medicines focuses on public health concerns about HIV/AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis, the SARS virus, influenza, and diseases ...of poverty. The essays explore the diplomatic negotiations and disputes in key international fora, such as the World Trade Organization, the World Health Organization and the World Intellectual Property Organization. Drawing upon international trade law, innovation policy, intellectual property law, health law, human rights and philosophy, the authors seek to canvass policy solutions which encourage and reward worthwhile pharmaceutical innovation while ensuring affordable access to advanced medicines. A number of creative policy options are critically assessed, including the development of a Health Impact Fund, prizes for medical innovation, the use of patent pools, open-source drug development and forms of 'creative capitalism'.
This paper uses Australia as a case study to analyse restrictions on international movement during the COVID-19 pandemic. Restrictions on inbound and outbound travel have been a key tool deployed by ...governments across the globe to suppress the COVID-19 pandemic. We use 'COVID zero' Australia as a case study to assess an extreme response to restricting international movement. We look at the recent complaint launched before the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva. The action was raised with the support of a group of Australian citizens stranded abroad with the assistance of the expert in Australian constitutional law who is the second author of this paper. We argue that the measures implemented by Australian governments to effectively eliminate COVID-19 domestically have provided insufficient consideration of, and alternatives to, the current system's failure to facilitate essential international travel. For this reason, Australia's framework for restricting international movement lacks proportionality and necessity from the perspective of human rights and freedoms.
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