Griffith law review 

About: Griffith law review is an academic journal published by Taylor & Francis. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Politics & Indigenous. It has an ISSN identifier of 1038-3441. Over the lifetime, 581 publications have been published receiving 5014 citations.

Inciting Legal Fictions: 'Disability's' date with Ontology and the Ableist Body of Law

Abstract: Activists with 'disabilities' have placed great trust in the legal body to deliver freedoms in the form of equality rights and protections against discrimination. This article argues that, while such equalisation initiatives have provided remedies in the lives of some individuals with 'disabilities', the sub-text of 'disability' as negative ontology has remained substantially unchallenged. Understanding disability requires more sustained attention to the ontological nature of disability, in particular the ways in which a 'disabled person' is produced. The article opens with a discussion of the difficult and complex(ing) area of ontology - in particular the performativity of 'disability' as a history of unthought and then moves on to a discussion of the ways 'disabled bodies' negotiate the symbol trade in 'disability' within the confines of the ableist regime of law. The increasing disability ontology wars are foregrounded by discussing the ways in which 'negative ontologies' are written into the practices and effects of law. As such, the article's focal concerns extend to law's understanding of the autonomous individual and technologies of freedom, strategies of 'social injuries', and attempts to introduce new formations of disability related to matters of 'election' and 'mitigation'. These battles over the (re)writing of disability are important because they affect the access of people with disabilities to welfare provision, protection under anti-discrimination legislation and formations of the perfectible, abled human self. Finally, the article concludes by suggesting that the law's continual reiteration of defective corporeality through the signification of 'disability' as legal proclamation (prescription) not only disallows the 'disabled' subject any escape from the normalising practices of compensation and mitigation but continues to negate possibilities of imagining the desiring 'disabled subject' in any voluptuous way.

Public Space: Its Mythopoetic Foundations and the Limits of the Law

Abstract: Drawing on William Dawes' unpublished notebooks on the Indigenous languages spoken around Sydney Cove at the time of white settlement, this article hopes to provoke critical reflection on the limits of the law Dawes' record of communication with Patyegarang documents a transaction that was both political and erotic, both about the law and in defiance of it In performances that were gestural as well as verbal, they marked out a middle ground where the laws governing both of them were placed in parentheses and new, provisional, rules of exchange improvised This article notices the existence of this middle ground, and marks its disappearance in subsequent legal discourse about the status of Indigenous people Ultimately, it offers a reflection on the laws that govern the meeting place which the middle ground underwrites That is, before public space became fixed for the legally binding discourse of politics, it was mobile and self-constituting Is this simply a myth or is it a mythopoetic mechanism for rethinking the grounding of law in Australia? If it is the latter, then the next step will be to establish a middle ground of exchange with Indigenous law-giving systems

No-bodies: Law, Raciality and Violence

Abstract: When has it become a matter of fact - more than evidence, and yet not a self-evident 'truth' - that a (perhaps never to be known) number of young males and females perish as subjects of law's preserving violence? In this article, this question will guide a consideration of a dimension of contemporary global existence that should become a theme of the theorising of the political. It describes a political scene in which the arms of the state - the police and the military - deploy total violence as a regulating tactic. More specifically, it reads the state's occupations of Rio de Janeiro's economically dispossessed neighbourhoods, where drug traffickers compete to institute the 'law of the land', as enactments of a different kind of founding contract, racial violence signifies. In this account of the political (ethical-juridical) scene, the dead bodies of black and brown teenagers count not as casualties of urban wars, but as signifiers of the horizon of death. For the racial subaltern's existence as an effect of the tools of raciality (racial and cultural difference) unfolds in territories in which the state acts only in the name of its own preservation.

The War Against Animals

Abstract: Human domination of animals has a continuing and catastrophic somatechnic effect across the globe for non-human entities. Utilising recent contemporary continental approaches from Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben, this article argues that this continuing violence might be positioned within the context of war, sovereignty and biopolitics, where the civil political space hides forms of intense domination of animal life, through apparatuses that do not, at least on the outside, betray the form of war. In contrast to welfare and rights approaches which have the potential not to challenge the fundamental human right to dominate non-human life, it is argued that recognition of animal sovereignties provides a potential platform by which to address human violence against non-human animals.

The Best Interests of the Child?: The Stolen Generations in Canada and Australia

Abstract: The common policy of the Australian and Canadian governments of removing Aboriginal children from their families and placing them in institutions is now well documented. The key basis for such removals was a policy of assimilation. As a consequence of these revelations, litigation has been undertaken by members of the stolen generations in both Canada and Australia. This article considers the key cases in Canada and Australia in regard to three entwined strands of such claims: vicarious liability, non-delegable duties and duty of care. While the plaintiffs in the leading Canadian cases were ultimately successful under at least one of their heads of claim, the approaches in these cases in regard to the Crown’s liability for breach of the duty of care and non-delegable duties is inconsistent. Thus, even in Canada, key legal issues pertaining to the Crown’s liability for the Aboriginal residential school experience continues to be unresolved. Within this framework, the article also considers the key Australi...