UVic Graduate Student Law & Society Research Group Publications
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Item Reading and writing the world with mathematics: Designing learning through storytelling and data(2025-03-25) Nicol, CynthiaThis presentation introduces principles and frameworks for designing learning and communicating issues that include mathematical ideas and concepts. I draw upon storytelling, Indigenous Storywork, data visualizations, and Universal Designs for Learning (UDL) to explore how communicating with mathematical ideas provides opportunities for reading (interpreting) and writing (changing) the world with mathematics so that all, human and more-than-human, can truly flourish.Item Design in legal education: Engagement, clarity and agency(2025-03-11) Allbon, EmilyProfessor Emily Allbon began applying design principles to her work within legal education 25 years ago, and although her role has changed and the needs of young people learning law have shifted, the backbone of why design is still so pivotal remains. In this presentation, she talks about her eclectic practice involving virtual villages for land lawyers, mapping treacherous journeys to improve essay writing, unpicking Brexit, explaining consent to schoolchildren, improving understanding of reproductive rights in Nepal and clarifying procedures for making police complaints in the UK.Item Designing support for litigants in person: Using human-centred design(2025-02-25) McKeever, Gráinne; Royal-Dawson, LucySince 2016, the Litigants in Person in Northern Ireland (LIPNI) research study has been exploring the experiences of litigants in person (LIPs) in civil and family cases in the jurisdiction, and developing supports for them. We defined LIPs as individuals who do not have legal representation in their court hearing. Four main barriers prevent LIPs from participating in their legal proceedings: intellectual (not understanding the process), practical (not being able to access help or support), emotional (the process itself generating frustration, fear and anger) and attitudinal (being stereotyped as difficult to deal with). Beyond understanding the litigation experience of LIPs, our other research aims were to explore whether the practical and attitudinal barriers could be overcome. We wanted to know whether creating support materials for LIPs through a co-productive process could generate changes in attitudes by and towards LIPs. In two human-centred design processes we have worked with numerous stakeholders, including LIPs, to co-create two supports now in the public domain: a website containing information about conducting family cases; and a Charter aimed at improving the communication and relationships between a LIP and the solicitor for the other party in the same case. Our presentation will offer an overview of our HCD processes, our approach to these as research questions, and our findings related to the power of HCD to bring about a change in perspective as well as valuable assets to support LIPs.Item Solidarity by design: Participatory design and movement lawyering(2025-02-12) Pope, Hallie JayMovement lawyering frameworks urge advocates to take their lead from ordinary people impacted by injustice, to shift power from legal institutions to communities, and to align legal work with collective movements to transform the law. But how do we do this? Participatory legal design offers promising methods for engaging in meaningful movement lawyering. In this talk, we will explore these methods through the work of the New Jersey Legal Design Lab, an initiative at Seton Hall Law School that facilitates creative, collaborative, and community-driven approaches to housing justice problems in New Jersey.Item Beyond the Visual Theorising Legal Design for Accessibility and Inclusion through an Ability Capitalism Lens(2025) Williams, ClareWhat can a theory of disability bring to our understanding of design-based approaches in legal education? In this presentation, I will extend my chapter on Design in Legal Education by exploring how ‘legal design’ or ‘designerly ways’ can be incorporated into research methods and teaching. I will explore the potential of prefigurative counterfactuals to construct alternative realities through which we can explore ways of doing, talking, and thinking about law, economy, and society. I will take insights from my latest research on disability and my theory of Ability Capitalism to interrogate current shortcomings in how we theorize design-based approaches to legal education, and I will make two suggestions. Firstly, I propose that disability, specifically an Ability Capitalism lens, can help us identify pathways towards a deeper theoretical and conceptual engagement with a designerly lens, while secondly, this is both urgent and necessary for inclusion, accessibility and representation in education and beyond.Item Social atrophy, social infrastructure, and the commons(2025-01-21) Stein Lubrano, SarahIn this short talk, Dr. Sarah Stein Lubrano will describe the important problem of social atrophy, a diminishing of social ability and judgement that occurs when people are socially isolated. Cognitive and neuroscientific research demonstrates that social atrophy weakens people's ability to engage in social life and makes them more withdrawn and even paranoid, creating a spiraling negative effect on both individuals and societies. Dr. Stein Lubrano will then argue that these key features mean that social atrophy is a better way of framing and understanding the problem of social isolation in the 21st century compared to the more popular description, a "loneliness epidemic." And understanding this problem well matters greatly, as social isolation is currently at a 50-year high in many Western countries. Dr. Stein Lubrano will then describe a crucial measure to counteract this problem: the creation of social infrastructure. Social infrastructure provides the means for people to regularly and easily gather and can counteract the trend towards social atrophy. Furthermore, Dr. Stein Lubrano will hypothesise that social infrastructure and the "social capital" it generates are best understood as commons, that is, as types of wealth that either only can or only should be owned collectively, and which therefore may need different legal frameworks than most private property. Finally, Dr. Stein Lubrano will consider the political significance of social infrastructure, the inability of online spaces to provide some of its crucial functions, and whether this social and legal problem might be tied to related questions about the right for people to not only gather together to speak about political issues but also act together, drawing on the work of legal theorist Stanley Ingber.Item Doing contracts differently – A look at visual and comic book contracts(2024-11-04) Andersen, CamillaDo you know that visual and comic book contracts have opened the door for creative forms of contracting and furthered accessibility and transparency in the last decade? Nowadays, visual contracts are well received by people, companies, and students in different places. In this presentation, Professor Andersen from UWA shares her work over the last decade on simplifying and visualising contracts to make them more relational, enjoyable and transparent.Item Legal design in action: From complex to clear with AI-assisted information design and plain language(2024-10-21) Haapio, Helena; Ketola, AnneClarity is now more important than ever. Legal Design in Action is about transforming complex information into clear, accessible communication for all. This session shows how AI-assisted information design and plain language can be used to simplify contracts and legal content. We will share practical examples, tools and methods for making information understandable and user-friendly, so that everyone can engage with it more effectively.Item Spectrums of legal design: Navigating methods and ethics in practice(2024) MacLoud, EmilyIn this talk, we'll explore the diverse range of design methods available within the legal domain, focusing on how these approaches can address complex challenges. Drawing on examples from my work at Portable and other projects, we will discuss how legal design operates across different spectrums—from traditional to innovative methods—and how ethical considerations are woven into these practices. Through this exploration, we’ll examine the critical role that ethics plays in shaping effective, meaningful legal design solutions.Item “Kill the chicken to scare the monkey”: Heavy penalties, excessive COVID-19 control mechanisms, and legal consciousness in China(2023-02-19) Yang, QianIn this presentation, Dr. Liu talks about her most recent paper: "Kill the Chicken to Scare the Monkey": Heavy Penalties, Excessive COVID-19 Control Mechanisms, and Legal Consciousness in China. In her paper, Dr. Liu analyzed the legal consciousness of Chinese citizens during the COVID-19 pandemic when the authoritarian state invoked heavy penalties to deter noncompliance with its excessive COVID-19 restrictions. China used the approach of “killing the chicken to scare the monkey,” publicly punishing those who violated restrictions in order to deter noncompliance. During her presentation, our speaker will explain why ordinary citizens supported this selective application of the law, as well as how the possibility of being the “chicken” contributed to their compliance (or noncompliance) with excessive COVID-19 restrictions. Her research suggests that the uncertainty and unpredictability of law in the authoritarian state bred fear, which then led to compliance, regardless of the lack of procedural fairness. People's dissatisfaction with the rules, however, led them to tolerate and even support the noncompliance of people they trusted.Item The golden touch: (Neo)extractivism and necropolitics on Brazil’s Indigenous territories(2022-12-08) Macias Gimenez, RebecaIn the last few years, mainly since 2019, when Jair Bolsonaro was sworn in as President, the federal government has revamped neo-extractivist policies targeting all protected areas in the country, including Indigenous territories. The government gained the perfect excuse for boosting the country’s mining economy when the pandemic hit. With the financial uncertainties caused by the pandemic, the international demand for gold increased, as the market regarded it as the most reliable form of investment. Brazil is one of the top ten producers of gold in the world. The country's mining sector has been at the forefront of colonization strategies for over four hundred years and has been one of the main threats to Indigenous and traditional communities. In the last decades, a neo-extractivist development model based on mining, agribusiness, and infrastructure building, such as hydropower dams, roads, and ports, led to the growth of social exclusion and violence in the country, especially in the Amazon region, among traditional communities that rely on the land and forests for their survival. The presentation addresses some of the historical and conceptual foundations of this government’s discourse and actions against Indigenous peoples, as well as its attempts to make constitutional the occupation and exploitation of Indigenous territories.Item The dangers of negotiating with Rome: Treaties, the law of nations and contested diplomacy space in the ancient Mediterranean(2022-11-29) Cornwell, HannahDiplomacy is an inherently spatial practice, centred around the negotiation of identities, boundaries and subjectivities within space. It is also a form of human action that creates, produces and constructs social relations. Starting from a consideration of treaties (foedera) as a means of defining relations between states, this presentation examines ideas of contested spaces of diplomacy in relation to the ancient Roman state. In constructing an understanding of diplomatic culture in the Roman world, it also emphasises how, due to a complex network of interstate and interpersonal relations, acts of diplomacy are always precarious.Item Six miles deep: The Haldimand Treaty and Six Nations of the Grand River’s land rights(2022-10-27) Monture, PhilPhil Monture of Six Nations of the Grand River talks about the Haldimand Treaty of 1784. The treaty covers lands for six miles on each side of the Grand River from Lake Erie to its source. Monture, who has been researching this history for almost 40 years, provides a historical overview of various land transactions and will discuss current Six Nations efforts in Canada and at the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Peoples to have their land claim resolved.Item Debates on the beginning of life and legal regulations to personhood: A feminist approach(2024-03-20) Amoroso Gonçalves, TamaraHighly organized conservative groups have been pushing for stricter abortion laws all over the world. After the overturn of Roe vs. Wade in USA, women, feminists and health care professionals all over the world are worried about backlash in their own jurisdictions. In this scenario, while France has just changed its Constitution to include the right to legal abortions as a fundamental right; legal and feminist scholars have been debating when life starts and when legal protection from personhood starts. By discussing the case of Brazil, and taking a feminist and human rights approach, I will present how law regulates the multiple stages of life, and why such differences matter for preserving women’s access to sexual and reproductive rights. Building on previous research on this topic and from a socio-legal perspective, I will discuss challenges to legalizing abortion in Brazil; as well as lessons emerging from Brazil and other Latin American Countries in blocking conservative changes at the legal and constitutional level to protect women’s rights.Item Feeling person-able: Thinking with sex robots, therapy dogs and artificial friends(2024-02-19) Hamilton, Sheryl N.I have long been interested in the stories we tell about the entities which/who, in any given time and place, emerge as favoured candidates for membership in one of Western law’s most hallowed categories: the legal person. The performances required for the political prize of personality – reason, language, consciousness or self-interest – are as pernicious as they are prevalent. Yet boundaries always presuppose boundary work. And beings are entangled; categories porous; stories, unruly. In this presentation, I examine some contemporary narratives featuring sex robots, therapy dogs and artificial friends drawn from a range of sites of legal culture. These tales reveal our anxieties and obsessions, our delusions and desires. They make visible a series of conceptual traps in Western thinking about the person, and at the same time, open up possibilities for impersonating differently. Embodiment, entanglement, touch and care all surface in these stories with powerful effects and affects.Item Interdisciplinary community engaged academic research: Applying feminist methodologies(2024-02-26) Amoroso Gonsalves, TamaraOver the last 20 years, my academic work has explored topics in gender and human rights law in a closely intertwined engagement with the human rights and feminist movements in Brazil. My research agenda is community-engaged, place-based, and interdisciplinary, connecting law with socio-inequalities issues from a gender perspective. Following this thread, in my doctoral dissertation I use a consumer law case related to a sexist advertisement (Skol Summer Muse campaign) to examine the effectiveness of feminist engagement with the Brazilian State and the market. Brazilian consumer law is a hybrid law, where the state oversees private relationships, imposing the observance of public principles on private social actors. It is also hybrid in the sense that it combines civil, criminal, procedure, and administrative legislation in a single code. The Brazilian Consumer Code forbids discriminatory advertising but does not define it. This complex case involved multiple social actors, political and legal processes: the market (represented by the beer company that promoted the advertisement and the market self-regulatory body that monitors advertisement in Brazil); the feminist movement; and the state (represented by state and federal prosecutors, the judiciary, and PROCONS - administrative bodies that enforce consumer law) during a time of significant social change in Brazil. Theoretically grounding my work in feminist political economy analysis and considering contestation about sexist advertising as a relevant focus for political action, I discuss how material social inequalities are produced, reflected, reproduced, and reinforced in two ways: i) visually in advertising, and ii) discursively in the legal documents that comprise the litigation around the Skol Summer Muse Campaign. This work brings into conversation: i) fields of law that are hybrid (neither private or public) namely national and international human rights law that protects women, and consumer law in Brazil; and ii) discussions of material redistribution and visual representation in advertising, and establishes advertising and consumer law as a fruitful field for political action and contestation. I also look at the limits and challenges, as well as the strengths of the feminist movement in Brazil. Finally, my dissertation involved an extensive, and thorough process of translation, and considers the challenges and politics of providing full and multi-layered translations of legal systems, concepts and cultures.Item The legal somatics of Bentham’s Auto-Icon and those who willed their carcases away(2024-01-31) Shaw, Joshua D. M.The author undertakes a critical and theoretical study of the political writings of Jeremy Bentham and his friends and colleagues relative to the Anatomy Act 1832 in the United Kingdom; the public dissection of Bentham’s body by Dr. Thomas Southwood Smith in 1832 prior to the passage of the Act; and the “Auto-Icon,” both the subject of his essay on the use and disposal of the dead human body written in 1831 and his name for his simulacrum seated in University College London. The author argues that Bentham’s Auto-Icon is an early exemplar of bioart (art made from human tissues or bodily matter), or at least an instance of political aesthetics making use of the body, which formed part of a project of law reform: in other words, an instance of “legal somatics.” The legal somatics of the bioart are described in terms of literary and aesthetic modes and meanings embodied in the use of bodily matter, and connected to similar acts of those who “willed,” or postured as if they would will, their bodies away for posthumous dissection and use for experimentation, such as John Boys who, 30 years prior to drafting his will contested in Boys v Morgan [1838] EngR 768, 59 ER 359, agreed with a Dr. Hector Campbell “that he should have [Boys’] carcase for chemical and anatomical experiments.” In doing so, the author considers how the human body in, and as, art or aesthetic practice factors in challenging and creating legal principles and values.Item Romani law as a model of the variability of conflict resolution and the maintenance of social order in human legal systems(2021-11-17) Acton, ThomasCan legislation resolve the conflicts between ‘national majorities’ and Romani/Gypsy/Roma/Traveller communities? It won’t do so, until the framers of law become aware not only of the ways in which these communities resolve conflicts among themselves, but also of the historical origins of such conflicts. In this presentation, Professor Thomas Acton D.Phil. (Oxon.) introduces us to the vast legal traditions of Romani people. To this goal, law is explored as a process, while social conflict is presented as a social institution in which participants possess common understandings. Untangling the common threads of those understandings is one of the most interesting yet difficult areas of the study of law and society.Item Animals as Property, Quasi-Property or Quasi-Person(2024-01-22) Fernández, AngelaThe field of animal law has been structured for the last twenty-five years around two key paradigms: (i) property v. persons and (ii) rights v. welfare. In this talk, Professor Fernández explains why both of these binaries are unhelpful traps for the field and why she thinks we need to move towards a more flexible legal status for nonhuman animals, which she terms quasi-property/quasi-personhood. In the quasi-hood approach to the legal status of nonhuman animals, nonhuman animals are more than mere property but they are also persons of a sort, legal persons, because they have legal rights, and only legal persons have legal rights.Item Repairing our Relationship with Rivers: Water Law and Legal Personhood(2023-12-11) O'Donnell, ErinSince 2017, rivers around the world have experienced a profound transformation in law: they have become legal persons, legal subjects, living persons, and/or living entities. This alchemical transfiguration from legal object to legal subject renders the river uniquely visible, and legible, to the law in ways it has not been before, and often brings with it new legal rights and powers. In this presentation, I ask what this transformation means for water law, and what the implications are for established water law frameworks. To date, the impact on water law has been relatively minor: new river persons have never yet received any legal rights to the water flowing between their banks. But their existence challenges the foundational assumption of Western water law: that water is merely a resource, capable of exploitation for human consumption. These new river entities demonstrate the power of law as a mode of repair, and create an opportunity to repair and restore our relationship with rivers. So far, water law has maintained its distance from this emerging transnational concept, but this position is becoming increasingly untenable. When a river is a living entity, or a legal person, the question for all water scholars and practitioners becomes: what does it mean to be in good relations with the river?