Postgraduate Research Students
Completed
2011 and 2012
Takele Soboka Bulto
(2011)
Thesis: The Imperatives of Extraterritorial Application of the Human Right to Water: A Case Study of the Nile Basin
Supervisors: Carolyn Evans and Jacqueline Peel
Takele Soboka Bulto, (Ethiopia) holds LLB and MA degrees from Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia, and an LLM degree from University of Pretoria, South Africa. Takele worked as a judge and lecturer in Ethiopia and a visiting lecturer at the Centre for Human Rights, Faculty of Law, University of Pretoria. He also worked as Programme Coordinator for Child Rights and Child Rights Programming in Eastern and Central African Regional Office of Save the Children Sweden. Just before taking up his PhD studies at Melbourne Law School Takele was a Legal Officer in a PanAfrican Pioneer NGO, Institute for Human Rights and Development in Africa, where he practiced before the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights and the African Committee of Experts on the Rights and Welfare of the Child. He represented victims on human rights violations from Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, Kenya and Angola and defended their cases before the two African regional human rights bodies.
Takele has published his works in American, South African and Ethiopian Journals. His most recent works entitled ‘Between Ambivalence and Necessity: Occlusions on the Path Towards A Basin-Wide Treaty in the Nile Basin’ and ‘The Interplay of the Equality Clause and Affirmative Action Measures under the Ethiopian Constitution: The Benishangul Gumuz Case and Beyond’ are forthcoming in 20 (1) Colorado Journal of International Environmental Law and Policy(2008) and 2 Ethiopian Human Rights Law Review (2008), respectively.
His PhD thesis analyses the operationalisation of the emerging human right to water in Africa. Given that every single African state has at least one water source to share with another state, the realisation of the human right to water in Africa is primarily dependent upon resources that cross international borders of states that rely on the same resource to fulfil the human right to water in their respective territories. Many states lack the necessary water resources from within their territories, and found themselves under resource constraints that would severely hamper their ability to ‘respect’, ‘protect,’ ‘promote’ and ‘fulfil’ the human rights of their inhabitants. Taking the Nile Basin as a case study, Takele’s thesis seeks to explore riparian states’ extraterritorial legal obligations in the fulfilment of a human right to water of the populations living beyond their own borders.
Olivera Simic
(2011)
Thesis: Is the zero tolerance approach to sex between UN peacekeeping personnel and local people in the context of UN peacekeeping operations the best way to prevent “sexual exploitation” in the future?
Supervisors: Dianne Otto and Michelle Foster
Olivera Simic has an LLM in International Human Rights Law (Essex University, UK) and MA in Gender and Peacebuilding (UN University for Peace, Costa Rica). For more than a decade she has been working as Gender and Law Consultant for different agencies (UNICEF, OSCE, ICMPD etc). Also, she has been actively engaged with projects related to women’s and children’s human rights in different capacities (activist, researcher, trainer, tutor, lecturer). Her fields of interests are gender, sexual abuse, sexual exploitation, organized crime, militarism, war, peacekeeping, reconciliation.
Her thesis argues that, although the zero tolerance policy should be welcomed as the first important step towards comprehensive recognition of the problem of “sexual exploitation” in the UN peacekeeping context, the policy is not only problematic because of its broad definition of “sexual exploitation”, but for several other reasons as well. In her thesis she examines why and how the zero tolerance policy was tailored as well as what assumptions it makes, in particular about the people with whom it is most concerned. Her thesis aims to explain bewilderment about the zero tolerance policy’s broadly defined term of “sexual exploitation”. Search for the identification of the fine line between coerced sex and different layers of consensual sex lies at the heart of her research project.
Kasia Lach
(2012)
Thesis: Sovereignty and the 2004 Eastern enlargement of the European Union; an inquiry into the dynamics of European legal integration
Supervisor: Anne Orford and Carolyn Evans
On 1 May 2004 ten states joined the European Union. A particular challenge was posed by the accession of eight post-communist states of Central Eastern Europe since their legal systems had had to be profoundly reformed in order for these states to become members of the European Union. One of the aspects that raised some concerns was the alleged attachment of the new Member States to sovereignty; an attachment supposedly largely absent in the old Member States and regarded as obsolete in the post-modern era of increasing interdependencies and extra-state configurations of authority.
Placed in such a context, the present inquiry brings together two phenomena: the conceptualisations and interpretations of sovereignty in the new Member States of the European Union and the process of European integration. The main research question is whether the Central Eastern European accounts of sovereignty and European integration are indeed specific to the new Member States (Poland and Hungary), or whether similar patterns have also been observable in the old Member States (Germany and France) and thus should be viewed as exemplifications of a universal development intrinsic to the process of European integration rather than as a Central Eastern European idiosyncrasy. Narrowing down the focus of the inquiry even further, the central thesis question has been analysed from the vantage point of constitutional law; the focus of the study is on constitutional accounts of sovereignty, European legal integration and the modes of interaction between the two.
Cressida Limon
(2012)
Thesis: Genes, Biotechnologies and Legal Imaginings: A Feminist Analysis of Intellectual Property
Supervisor: Anne Orford and Lee Godden
Cressida holds a BA (Biological Anthropology) from the Australian National University and an LLB (Hons) from La Trobe University. Cressida has worked in the community legal sector and has taught legal theory, legal research methods and discrimination law at Victoria University, Melbourne and bioethics at the University of California Santa Cruz. Cressida has been a member of the Editorial Board of the Australian Feminist Law Journal since 2001. Cressida’s current research interests include intellectual property, feminist legal theory, science and technology studies and invention.
Cressida's thesis is concerned with the narratives of invention and reproduction at the intersection of law and technoscience. In the thesis Cressida critically examines the theories of intellectual property to highlight the subjective and cultural basis of invention. This examination exposes the class, gendered and colonial dimensions of the laws of invention. Her analysis focuses on debates about patenting life, assisted reproduction technologies and genetic discrimination. Critical legal theory has shown how patent law assumes a binary opposition between nature/culture; science and technology studies have shown how biotechnologies undo the binary opposition between nature/culture; feminist theory shows that we should be sceptical about these positions.
Research Higher Degree students for 2012
Olivia Barr
Thesis: Geographies of Jurisdiction: Aboriginal Sovereignty and the Common Law in Australia
Supervisors: Peter Rush, Shaun McVeigh and Maureen Tehan
Olivia Barr graduated from the University of Western Australia with a Bachelor of Laws (Dist) and a Bachelor of Arts (Anthropology) before graduating from the University of British Columbia with a Master of Laws. Olivia has worked in law reform, as a government solicitor and for the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. Her doctoral thesis contemplates the role of jurisdiction in locating and placing the common law through the utilisation of critical approaches to jurisdiction and critical legal geography.
Meg Brodie
Thesis: Agents of Change: What power do national human rights institutions have to affect the process of transformative social change?
Supervisors: Dianne Otto, John Chesterman and Brian Burdekin (external)
Meg Brodie completed a BA(Hons)/LLB(Hons) at the University of Melbourne. Her PhD investigates national inquiries conducted by the National Human Rights Commissions of Mongolia and India. Her fieldwork was supported by an Endeavour Research Fellowship. A lawyer, Meg has worked in both the corporate and not-for-profit sectors and currently sits on the Board of the Oaktree Foundation. In 2009 Meg will take up a Teaching Fellowship at the Law School.
Peter Chambers
Thesis: Power in Transformation: Christmas Island, Border Security, Governance
Supervisors: Peter Rush and Nikos Papastergiadis (Faculty of Arts)
In 2012, Christmas Island is best known as a place of immigration detention, a component of Australia’s expanding border security apparatus. In the 124 years since it was annexed by the British, Christmas Island has continued to take on changing political forms. In exploring these changes empirically and theoretically, this thesis gives an account of the mutation of political sovereignty, the emergence of globalisation, the installation of governance, and their current co-operation through the practice of border security and immigration detention, as seen from the Island. It considers the way shifts in thinking and ways of imagining problems - as political, as urgent - have provoked and continue to prompt the construction of certain kinds of structures: mines, casinos, and now the immigration detention centre. The centre is a high-tech, medium security prison situated in the middle of a tropical rainforest that includes back-to-base surveillance technology, wheelchair access, and specially designed concrete tunnels constructed to facilitate the orderly migration of red crabs across the Island.
The core argument stems from the recognition that all governing is a matter of problem solving, but that, every time, problems are solved within the enabling constraints characterising each problem space. Governing moves from imagination to application to a materiality that turns out to be perennially unruly: nothing works as intended; yesterdays best laid plans are today’s follies; things fall apart. The picture of power’s transformations depicted points not only to the transience of all things human, but that what is characteristic of power’s shape in our time is that it holds without the centre. And yet, Christmas Island’s story is also full of ironies and impasses. The attempted passage of authority through governance and the restless, anxious search for accumulative mobility characteristic of today’s capitalism also, paradoxically, produces specific sites of friction and immobility, certain kinds of paralysis, and a curious desire to project messages into a region and future that border security can only recognise and secure as a threat-filled theatre of interdiction.
Christmas Island is strange, but the ways in which it is tell a striking and disquieting story about how power came to be what it is, while suggesting what we might be becoming. In accounting for transformations of power on Christmas Island, this thesis also offers an account of the conceptual and intellectual resources necessary to make sense of the power relations to which we are subject: here, now and in the future.
Nicola Charwat
Title: Public Interest Amicus Curiae in WTO Dispute Settlement: Contesting Global Market Governance?
Supervisor: Dianne Otto
The WTO Appellate Body’s acceptance of amicus curiae briefs (ACBs) submitted by public interest actors in dispute settlement is accepted as a hard won victory by civil society. As such, the ACB is generally understood as improving WTO governance, which is otherwise characterised as prioritising market interests and excluding public interests. My thesis provides a critical analysis of the potential contribution of public interest actor briefs to challenges to global market governance. Focusing on WTO dispute settlement as a powerful site of governance, I explore both the limits of the ACB, and opportunities it presents, as a means of inserting the public interest into the interpretation and application of trade rules.
Julia Dehm
Title: An investigation into the assumptions made about the management of risk to indigenous peoples and forest-dependent communities from REDD+; Indonesia and beyond
Supervisors: Maureen Tehan, Margaret Young, Kirsty Gover
Julia’s doctoral research thesis is about an investigation into the assumptions made about the management of risk to indigenous peoples and forest-dependant communities from REDD+; Indonesia and beyond.
Julia Dehm is a PhD candidate at the Melbourne Law School, her research focuses on the social impacts of carbon trading schemes on politically and economically marginalised individuals and communities.
She is also a climate justice activist who has been active in supporting mobilisations against coal in Australia and organising international solidarity against ‘false solutions’ to climate change. She presents a radio show 'Done By Law' (www.donebylaw.org) on community radio once a month and is involved in providing legal support to activist movements.
Sara Dehm
Title: Negotiating the Border: Law, Migrant Labour and Development
Supervisors: Sundhya Pahuja and Anne Orford
Sara Dehm holds Bachelors of Arts and Law and a Diploma of Modern Languages (Arabic Studies) from the University of Melbourne. She currently also works as a research and administrative assistant for the Social Justice Initiative, University of Melbourne. Her PhD research employs post-structuralist approaches to law to examine discourses of migration management, migration and development, citizenship and mobility, security and employment within international and regional institutions. Through an exploration of Australia's Seasonal Pacific Worker Pilot Scheme, her thesis attends to the ways in which the promise of formal migrant labour schemes to the international 'development' project has come to be narrated and implemented in the post-WWII period.
Elodie Da Silva
Title: Food Security and International Trade
Supervisors: Anne Orford and Sundhya Pahuja
Elodie commenced her research in early 2012. Eliminating hunger is a complex and multidimensional task, in which international trade plays a key role. However, the current food trading system has failed to prevent food crisis and to ensure that all people at all time have sufficient access to adequate food. Departing from that observation, the question is how to improve the current international trade rules in order to foster the equal sharing of the benefits of globalisation.
In fact, the rules governing international trade have been widely criticised for endangering food security in most developing countries by aggravating the marginalisation of small-scale farming from the current trading system at all stage of the process (from the creation of the rules to their application).
The question that arises is why, despite the repetitive food crisis and the unequal sharing of food products throughout the globe, these rules have remained unchanged. Trade law and legal instruments such as IP Rights could have positive effects on food security depending on what these rules aim to achieve. They should be used as a tool to achieve food security.
Maria Elander
Thesis: In The Name of the Victim: The Figure and Figuration of the Victim in International Criminal Justice
Supervisors: Peter Rush and Dianne Otto
Maria Elander holds a BA in Arabic and a BSS in Political Science from Uppsala University, and a MA in Human Rights Law from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Before commencing her PhD candidature, she worked as a research assistant at the American University of Cairo. Her PhD research examines the figure and the figuration of the victim in a critical reading of the discourse on international criminal justice. In particular, the thesis asks what victim is figured in international criminal law, how the victim can speak in and through international criminal law, and how to understand the figurations of the victim that now exist in the field. To examine these questions, the research looks at the developments at the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC).
Luis Eslava
Thesis: Spatial Dimensions of Law and Development: Transforming sovereignty, state and citizenship
Supervisor: Anne Orford and Shaun McVeigh
Luis Eslava completed his undergraduate law degree at Universidad Externado de Colombia and a Master of Law and Development at the Melbourne Law School.
Luis is interested in issues of Global Governance, from the perspective of critical Third World subjects. In the last few years, Luis has published various articles in Colombian and international journals, including Decentralization of 'Development and Nation-Building Today: Reconstructing Colombia from the Margins of Bogotá' in The Law and Development Review, 'Corporate Social Responsibility & Development: A knot of disempowerment' in Sortuz - Oñati Journal of Emergent Sociolegal Studies, 'Occupation Law: (Mis)Use and Consequences in Iraq' in Contexto and a review of 'Developing Power: How Women Transformed International Development' for Feminist Legal Studies.
Luis' PhD project investigates the implications of the decentralization of development in Colombia since the reform of the Colombian Constitution in 1991. It specifically asks what have been the effects of the move from national to local development on the juridico-political concepts of sovereignty, state and citizenship. It suggests that these reforms altered the geographical space in which development was usually conceived and performed as part of an international trend that portrays States as overgrown and unmanageable spaces. The effect was the creation of multiple sub-national territorial units, which overtook the nation-state and its citizens as the preferred sites of development interventions. To evaluate this development shift, the research adopts a case-based approach focusing on Bogotá, the capital city of Colombia.
Bec Goodbourn
Thesis: Sensing the city: space and subjective life of the laneways
Supervisors: Alison Young and Peter Rush
Bec Goodbourn completed her BA with honours in Criminology at the University of Melbourne.
Bec is interested in the everyday use of urban spaces; in looking at the way in which design and regulation affect physical and sensory experiences, and how physical and sensory experiences affect the ways in which we design and regulate. Her PhD research focuses specifically on the laneways of Melbourne’s CBD. In problematising notions of bodies as discrete or stable forms, Bec argues for a greater understanding of the relationship between sensory and physical experience in the laneways, and the materiality of social, economic and political processes.
Carolyn Graydon
Thesis: Domestic Violence in Timor-Leste: Is There a Place for Indigenous Justice Systems?
Supervisors: Tim Lindsey and Dianne Otto
Carolyn worked as an advocate in the area of refugee and immigration law for several years and then with the United Nations in Timor-Leste as a human rights officer. This experience triggered her interest in Timorese women’s responses to gender violence, more particularly their use of formal and indigenous justice systems. Carolyn’s thesis focuses on indigenous processes of developing and protecting human rights, more specifically, justice processes and their potential for long term transformation so that they are better able to deliver the justice and protection sought by Timorese women. In 2006 and 2007 she lectured at Melbourne University in the subject Law and Society in Southeast Asia.
Joseph Kikonyogo
Thesis: WTO Negotiations on Agriculture: Will the African Group Always Have a Raw Deal?
Supervisors: Andrew Mitchell and Tania Voon
By analysing negotiations on agriculture in the WTO Doha Round and assessing the position of sub-Saharan Africa in international trade, the thesis argues that countries in sub-Saharan Africa will not achieve the development objective of the Round because the countries have a weak bargaining base. It is recommended, therefore, that the African Group concentrate on finding ways of first building strong domestic and regional economic, legal and political institutions to enable them have substantial contributions to bring to the table.
Cressida Limon
Thesis: Genes, Biotechnologies and Legal Imaginings: A Feminist Analysis of Intellectual Property
Supervisor: Anne Orford and Lee Godden
Cressida holds a BA (Biological Anthropology) from the Australian National University and an LLB (Hons) from La Trobe University. Cressida has worked in the community legal sector and has taught legal theory, legal research methods and discrimination law at Victoria University, Melbourne and bioethics at the University of California Santa Cruz. Cressida has been a member of the Editorial Board of the Australian Feminist Law Journal since 2001. Cressida’s current research interests include intellectual property, feminist legal theory, science and technology studies and invention.
Cressida's thesis is concerned with the narratives of invention and reproduction at the intersection of law and technoscience. In the thesis Cressida critically examines the theories of intellectual property to highlight the subjective and cultural basis of invention. This examination exposes the class, gendered and colonial dimensions of the laws of invention. Her analysis focuses on debates about patenting life, assisted reproduction technologies and genetic discrimination. Critical legal theory has shown how patent law assumes a binary opposition between nature/culture; science and technology studies have shown how biotechnologies undo the binary opposition between nature/culture; feminist theory shows that we should be sceptical about these positions.
Eve Lester
Thesis: Making migration law work in Australia: paradoxes and prospects
Supervisor: Sundhya Pahuja and Shaun McVeigh
The central question of my thesis asks which historical dynamics have shaped immigration law-making in Australia so as to circumscribe enjoyment of basic social and economic rights, and pivotally the right to work, by people who migrate as part of a survival strategy. To this end, my thesis analyses the influence of a matrix of societal dynamics, including the concept of sovereignty, race, religion and political economy and their role in shaping social and economic rights and realities for survival migrants in Australia.
Liz Macpherson
Thesis title: Indigenous water rights in Chile and Australia: Can indigenous water rights be sustainably integrated in water markets?
Supervisors: Maureen Tehan and Kirsty Gover
Water planning frameworks underlying emerging Australian water markets do not adequately respond to indigenous demands for a water allocation for indigenous cultural and commercial use. This is because an indigenous water allocation is linked to prior recognition of indigenous groups and interests through the native title process, and native title water rights are difficult to establish, non-exclusive, and limited to non-commercial, traditional content. In Chile, where there is no recourse to native title, statute law has nonetheless been used to recognise water property rights for certain indigenous communities. The rights recognised contemplate an allocation under market-based water planning legislation and are not restricted to non-commercial content. Given that native title has failed to live up to indigenous water expectations, perhaps it is time to revisit approaches to indigenous water rights recognition. The creation of water markets, threatening to lock unrecognised indigenous use out of future water access, provides the opportunity to consider alternative recognition mechanisms. The aim of my thesis is to suggest an improved legal mechanism for recognition of cultural and commercial indigenous water rights in Australia. I consider the potential for statutory recognition of indigenous water rights outside of native title, drawing on an analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of statutory indigenous water rights recognition in Chile, against the backdrop of existing Australian models for statutory recognition in Aboriginal land legislation. My analysis of Chilean indigenous water rights includes their treatment in local administrative and judicial decisions, enabling an original contribution to the question of indigenous water rights recognition in Australia by opening up access to relevant information previously inaccessible to an English speaking audience.
Yoriko Otomo
Thesis: Unconditional Life: The time and technics of International Law
Supervisors: Anne Orford
Yoriko Otomo has worked in several government and non-government environmental organisations, and has contributed to publications relating to sustainable development, environmental law and humanitarian issues. Her doctoral thesis seeks to develop a semiology of law through a poststructural feminist analysis of key texts within the law of occupation and international economic law.
James Parker
Thesis: Listening to law: Simon Bikindi and the acoustics of justice
Supervisors: Andrew Kenyon and Shaun McVeigh
James completed his undergraduate degree in jurisprudence at Oxford and his LLM by research at the University of McGill in Montreal. He has taught at a number of universities throughout Australia and had both his academic work andmusic journalism published. He is coming towards the end of the first year of his PhD candidature at Melbourne. His thesis uses the case of renowned Rwandan singer and popular figure Simon Bikindi, who stood trial before the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda accused of inciting genocide with his music, to explore the relationship between law and sound. More particularly, it aims to (re-)introduce the acoustic into contemporary aesthetic and critical jurisprudence.
Connal Parsley
Thesis: Image and Law in Giorgio Agamben
Supervisors: Peter Rush and Shaun McVeigh
Connal Parsley teaches critical legal theory and legal ethics at the Melbourne Law School and School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Melbourne. With undergraduate degrees in law and linguistics, his work addresses intersections between legal, aesthetic and linguistic theory, and his publications have explored their interaction in particular Australian political contexts. Examples include the stolen generations litigation, the bureaucratic treatment of asylum seekers, and distinctions between law and public art’s respective structurings of the public sphere. His doctoral thesis extends his research interest in the relationship between visual culture and law, by examining the philosophical and jurisprudential dimensions of the relationship between image and law in the work of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben. By exposing the significance of Agamben’s notion of the ‘image’ within his revision of political ontology, the thesis aims both to develop a new paradigm for understanding the relation between law and politics in Agamben’s work, and to provide a rigorous basis for thinking the intimate tie between law and its spectral imagism.
Laura Petersen
Title: Legal dystopias: the implications of being outside, inside or beyond the law
Supervisors: Peter Rush and Shaun McVeigh
Laura Petersen is in the first year of her PhD at the Melbourne Law School at University of Melbourne. Her interdisciplinary research moves across visual art, fictional texts and critical theory to explore the concepts of utopia/dystopia and their intersections with law.
Laura recently completed her Master of Arts in Comparative Literature at Freie Universität Berlin, supported by a DAAD scholarship. Her thesis (in German) considered the role of metafictional narratives in Holocaust memory, examining texts by W.G. Sebald, Vladimir Sorokin and Jonathan Safran Foer. Laura studied her BA/LLB (Hons) at the University of Melbourne prior to beginning her postgraduate research.
Walter Rech
Thesis: Vattel and The 'Ennemis du Genre Humain'
Supervisors: Anne Orford and Sundhya Pahuja
Walter Rech graduated in philosophy from the University of Trento (Italy), doing research in Germany at Humboldt University and Free University of Berlin and at the University of Freiburg. He started his PhD in law at the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History in Frankfurt in 2007 and is continuing the same at Melbourne Law School. His thesis focuses on the Swiss international lawyer Emer de Vattel (1714-1767), traditionally regarded by commentators as the theorist of the 'guerre en forme'. Walter's aim is to complicate this interpretation by analysing the notion of an 'ennemi du genre humain'.
Mickaël Ho Foui Sang
Thesis: The Functions of Law in the Protection of Historical Truth
Supervisors: Anne Orford and Olivier Cayla (Paris X)
Mickaël Ho Foui Sang is underaking a PhD by cotutelle at Melbourne Law School and University of Paris X (Nanterre La Défense, France). Mickaël holds a Masters degree in Theory and Analysis of the Law and a degree in European Law from the University of Paris X (Nanterre, France). His Masters theses focused on the interaction of legal systems, especially on ways to rethink French private law in the context of European integration, both from a substantial and from a procedural law point of view. Mickaël is particularly interested in the tension between the State, collective memory and history in contemporary France and Australia. His research thesis explores the place and function of law in the process of reconciliation and the recognition of historical truth.
Marc Trabsky
Thesis: Voices of the Dead: Law, Aesthetics and Mortality
Supervisors: Peter Rush and Shaun McVeigh
Marc completed a BA/LLB (Hons) at The University of Melbourne and a MPhil in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at The University of Sydney. Before commencing postgraduate research, Marc taught undergraduate students in the School of Law at Birkbeck College. He currently teaches in the Melbourne Law School and the School of Social and Political Science at The University of Melbourne. His doctoral research explores a visceral jurisprudence of the dead. It questions not only how do the dead dwell in the places of law, but also the ceremonies and technologies through which the dead allow the law to speak. In particular, he examines the history of the legal form of the death mask and the use of visual and aural technology in the courtroom. The thesis engages with an aesthetic tradition as well as critical legal geography to consider a jurisdiction of the dead.
Deborah Whitehall
Title: Hannah Arendt, Beginnings and Female Subjectivity in International Law
Supervisors: Anne Orford and Ann Genovese
Deborah's research uses the work of Hannah Arendt as a resource for reworking familiar metaphors of human rights in ways that reveal the transformative potential of Law. She is particularly interested in how social and political theory can be used to generate questions about women's reproductive rights that reset the framework in which the options for reform might be considered. Deborah's project reflects her ongoing interest in the tensions between rights discourse in international human rights law and national law and the political and social trajectories in which human rights are given substance. Deborah has studied and taught law in Australia and the United Kingdom, and has experience in law reform, and as a solicitor in the public and private sectors.