Human and Nonhuman Normativity – What is to be Done?
After studying law and English literature at Adelaide University in the 1980s, Margaret completed a doctorate in critical legal theory at Sussex University. Margaret was a foundation staff member of the Law School at Flinders University and has been a visiting scholar at Birkbeck College, Umea University, UBC, and Victoria University of Wellington, and has held a Leverhulme Visiting Professorship at the University of Kent. She has been a recipient of four Australian Research Council grants, and is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia and the Australian Academy of Law. Margaret is author of six books - Asking the Law Question (4th edition 2017), Delimiting the Law (1996), Are Persons Property (with Ngaire Naffine, 2001), Property: Meanings, Histories, Theories (2007), Law Unlimited (2017, winner of the SLSA Theory and History Book Prize), and EcoLaw (2022). From 2010 to 2012 Margaret was a member of the Humanities and Creative Arts Panel of the ARC College of Experts, and chaired the panel in 2011. Margaret is on the advisory boards of Social and Legal Studies, Feminist Legal Studies, and the Macquarie Law Journal.
In recent writing, I have explored the continuity between, and comparability of, human and nonhuman normativity. In EcoLaw (2022), I define normativity as emerging from material patterns and pathways that are formed by purposive iterations and bonds. This definition enables a comparison to be drawn between the normative form of human and nonhuman nature. It also helps generate an image of normative plurality as a field of complex ordering that crosses the division of nature and culture. But what difference does this exceptionally broad image of natural normativity make to our understanding of human law? Is it merely a shift in orientation, after which everything legal nonetheless remains in place? Does it have any practical implications? These questions have frequently been raised in discussion of EcoLaw and, in this lecture, I will endeavour to address them.
This lecture is hybrid, in REC A3.01 and online via zoom. For the zoom link, please register via the button below.