- Wednesday, 15 September 2021
1:00 pm - 2:00 pm - Zoom – further details provided upon registration
Law schools were long preoccupied with the question of whether they were free to teach and research in the same way as the humanities or whether they were perpetually constrained by the presuppositions of legal practice. Since the Dawkins reforms, this dilemma has been overshadowed by a policy of state disinvestment in public education. The focus on fee-paying students means that academic capitalism has arguably become the raison d’être of the law school. The impetus to increase the number of job-ready graduates while decreasing the cost to the state has been ramped up as a result of Covid-19 and the collapse of the international student market.
This presentation will argue that the law school has become not only a source of capital accumulation for the neoliberal state, but also a source of human capital for both law students and academics. Consumer power has enabled students to influence both the curriculum and pedagogy in ways that prioritise job-ready new knowledge in accordance with the government aim. As neoliberal subjects, academics are also engaged in a kind of enterprise, the outcomes of which must be rendered calculable. This is most marked in respect of the pressure to engage in funded research. This is exerting a deleterious impact on teaching, which is increasingly assigned to an ever-expanding precariat.
About the presenter
Margaret Thornton is an Emerita Professor of Law at the Australian National University in Canberra. She has degrees from Sydney, UNSW and Yale, and is a Barrister of the Supreme Court of NSW and the High Court of Australia. She formerly occupied the Richard McGarvie Chair of Socio-Legal Studies at La Trobe University and has held visiting fellowships at Oxford, London, Columbia, Sydney and York, Canada. She has published extensively on issues relating to women and the law, including the only book-length study of women and the legal profession in Australia: Dissonance and Distrust: Women and the Legal Profession, Oxford 1996 (also published in Chinese by the Law Press, Beijing, 2001). Other books include The Liberal Promise: Anti-Discrimination Legislation in Australia(Oxford, 1990) and Privatising the Public University: The Case of Law (Routledge, 2012). Her current research project entails a study of the new ways of practising law with regard to gender, professionalism and technology. She is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia and a Foundation Fellow of the Australian Academy of Law.
Register on Humanitix