Interviews and New Books
Beyond Doctrine: Alternative and Critical Approaches to Law
The Institute for International Law and the Humanities (IILAH) in collaboration with the Melbourne Doctoral Forum on Legal Theory (MDFLT/Forum) were pleased to host a launch of Beyond Doctrine: Alternative and Critical Approaches to Law at Melbourne Law School.
Beyond Doctrine provides an authoritative and thoughtful introduction to different legal methodologies and situates those methodologies in an Australian context. Edited by Harry Hobbs and Jeremy Patrick, it includes contributions from an impressive array of Australian scholars covering theories that ask us to think more deeply about law and what it means.
On the evening of 24 November 2025, Earn Asanasak was joined by chapter authors Professor Heather Douglas, Professor Ann Genovese, Dr Claerwen O’Hara and Dr Alice Palmer to discuss their contributions to Beyond Doctrine and insights into the collaborative venture of an edited volume on legal theory.
This event happened in parallel with the launch of Beyond Doctrine in Sydney at the UNSW Legal Education Research Conference also in November 2025.
Queer Connections: A Triple Book Launch
This episode of the IILAH podcast captures the discussion at 'Queer Connections: A Triple Book Launch', where speakers celebrated and drew out the connections between three recent edited volumes focused on queer approaches to law.
Queer Judgments brings together scholars, lawyers, and activists from around the world who are interested in re-imagining and re-writing legal judgments by using queer and related critical perspectives. This edited collection has an international reach and multidisciplinary scope, and takes the reader through 26 judgments and commentaries on various legal fields: from crime and sodomy cases to privacy and discrimination cases, from family and parenthood cases to health and reproduction cases, and ending with asylum and migration cases. Queer Judgments is intended to be a teaching, research, and advocacy resource for anyone interested in critical perspectives on jurisprudence, queerness, and social justice.
Queer Encounters with International Law and Queer Engagements with International Law are sibling edited books, which apply insights from queer theory to a range of new issues and topics in international law. Queer Encounters explores new issues relating to gender, sexuality and LGBTIQ communities in international law, such as recent contestation over the definition of ‘gender’ in international criminal and human rights law and the possibility of building an international queer abolitionist movement. Queer Engagements moves beyond queer theory’s site of origin by applying queer theory to a range of new topics international law not directly related to gender and sexuality, including international environmental law, international space law, international heritage law and travaux préparatoires.
Speakers included: Dr Senthorun (Sen) Raj, Dr Claerwen O'Hara, Professor Di Otto, Dr Julia Dehm, Dr Danish Sheikh and Sarah Ward.
Book Launch: The Right to Legal Personhood of Marginalised Groups
The Institute for International Law and the Humanities was pleased to celebrate the publication of Associate Professor Anna Arstein-Kerslake's book, 'The Right to Legal Personhood of Marginalised Groups'. Anna was joined in conversation with Dr Erin O'Donnell and Associate Professor Olivia Barr. Professor Margaret Young chaired this event and Professor Helene Lambert gave a short introduction.
Book Abstract: The right to legal personhood has been enshrined in human rights law since its inception with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. However, the right has been largely overlooked. This book explores the marginalisation occurring as a result of barriers to the right to legal personhood and how this can be rectified. It analyses the right in relation to disability, gender, indigenous people, racial minorities, migrant groups, and stateless people. It presents a legal argument for the protection of the right and a normative analysis of the importance of the right in achieving equality in socio-legal systems
Alice Palmer and Gerry Simpson: Celebrating Natural Perception
This podcast episode captures the conversation between Dr Alice Palmer and Professor Gerry Simpson at the launch of Alice's new book 'Natural Perception: Environmental Images and Aesthetics in International Law'. Professor Margaret Young introduces the conversation and provides a brief summary of the event.
The Institute for International Law and the Humanities and the Melbourne Centre for Law and the Environment were pleased to celebrate the publication of Dr Alice Palmer's new book at the launch on Monday 8 April 2024.
Alice was joined in conversation with Professor Gerry Simpson, author of 'The Sentimental Life of International Law' and Professor of Public International Law at LSE Law School. They discussed the whys, hows and wheretos of seeing environmental images in international legal process.
International Status in the Shadow of Empire by Cait Storr
In this episode join Sundhya Pahuja and Shaun McVeigh in conversation with Cait Storr to launch her book titled ‘International Status in the Shadow of Empire: Nauru and the Histories of International Law’.
Book Description: Nauru is often figured as an anomaly in the international order. This book offers a new account of Nauru’s imperial history and examines its significance to the histories of international law. Drawing on theories of jurisdiction and bureaucracy, it reconstructs four shifts in Nauru’s status – from German protectorate, to League of Nations C Mandate, to UN Trust Territory, to sovereign state – as a means of redescribing the transition from the nineteenth century imperial order to the twentieth century state system. The book argues that as international status shifts, imperial form accretes: as Nauru’s status shifted, what occurred at the local level was a gradual process of bureaucratisation. Two conclusions emerge from this argument. The first is that imperial administration in Nauru produced the Republic’s post-independence ‘failures’. The second is that international recognition of sovereign status is best understood as marking a beginning, not an end, of the process of decolonisation.
Balakrishnan Rajagopal: The Right to Adequate Housing
Across the world today, more than one billion people live in substandard housing and informal settlements. Every year, several million people lose their homes as a consequence of development projects, conflicts, natural disasters or the climate crisis. Many of them are subjected to forced evictions.
To understand and address these issues, in 2000, the United Nations (UN) Commission on Human Rights established the role of Special Rapporteur on the Right to Adequate Housing.
In this Interview, Professor Sundhya Pahuja (University of Melbourne) and Dr Luis Eslava (Kent Law School) talk with Professor Balakrishnan Rajagopal (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) on his recent appointment to that role.
This interview addresses these questions and explores the various challenges and approaches to international law and development over the last 20 years.
Balakrishnan Rajagopal (USA) is Professor of Law and Development at
the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). A lawyer by training, he is an expert on many areas of human rights, including economic, social and cultural rights, the UN system, and the human rights challenges posed by development activities. He has conducted over 20 years of research on social movements and human rights advocacy around the world focusing in particular, on land and property rights, evictions and displacement.
A more extensive profile of Balakrishnan is available on the United Nations website.
Rahul Rao: Out of Time: The Queer Politics of Postcoloniality
Join Dr. Ntina Tzouvala (ANU) and Danish Sheikh (MLS) in conversation with Dr. Rahul Rao (SOAS), the author of 'Out of Time: The Queer Politics of Postcoloniality'.
In this book, Rahul explores the encounters and entanglements across geopolitical divides that produce and contest contemporary queerphobias. Intervening in a queer theoretical literature on temporality, the book argues that time and space matter differently in the queer politics of postcolonial countries. By employing an intersectional analysis and drawing on a range of sources, Rahul offers an original interpretation of why queerness mutates to become a metonym for categories such as nationality, religiosity, race, class, and caste.
Rahul Rao is Senior Lecturer in Politics at SOAS University of London and a member of the Radical Philosophy collective; Ntina Tzouvala is a Senior Lecturer at the ANU College of Law; Danish Sheikh is a PhD Candidate at Melbourne Law School and a Member of IILAH.
Michael Fakhri: Trade, Development and the Right to Food
What is the global food system? What are the politics of naming and shaming? What does a UN Special Rapporteur do? In this conversation, Professor Sundhya Pahuja and Dr Luis Eslava speak with Professor Michael Fakhri, the newly appointed UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food.
Professor Fakhri is the author of 'Sugar and the Making of International Trade' (Cambridge University Press, 2014), and the co-editor with Luis Eslava and Vasuki Nesiah of 'Bandung, Global History and International Law: Critical Pasts and Pending Futures' (Cambridge University Press, 2017).
Mac Darrow: Human Rights, Development and the UN
What's the relationship between development and human rights? Can human rights challenge economic orthodoxy? How does the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) do its work? In this conversation, Professor Sundhya Pahuja and André Dao speak with Dr Mac Darrow, the Representative of the OHCHR in Washington DC, responsible for the Office's policy engagement with international financial institutions.
Dr Darrow was previously chief of OHCHR's Sustainable Development Goals Section, leading the Office's effort to integrate human rights within global and country level development policy frameworks. He is a Senior Fellow in the Melbourne Law Masters program, and has published extensively in the fields of international human rights law, anti-discrimination law, climate change and human rights, and international organisations.
In Conversation with Dr Jessica Whyte
In this recording, Jessica explores why the neoliberal age has also been the age of human rights. Drawing on detailed archival research, she explores the place of human rights in an attempts to develop a moral framework for a market society. The book helps us to understand why coming to terms with these origins is so crucial. As we emerge from the COVID-19 crisis, now more than ever, we need to be think carefully about the languages and justifications which sustain inequality, and what we can do to challenge them.
Jessica Whyte is Scientia Fellow and Associate Professor at the School of Humanities and Languages (Philosophy) and the School of Law at the University of New South Wales, and is an Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow. She is a political theorist whose work integrates political philosophy, intellectual history and political economy to analyse contemporary forms of sovereignty, human rights, humanitarianism and militarism.