ÌÒÉ«ÊÓƵ

’s article ‘“’, published in Cake and Cockhorse, has won the British Association for Local History’s Publication Award for 2014.

Jackie Hodgson has been conferred the award of Academician of the Academy of Social Sciences in recognition of her distinctive and distinguished contributions to Social Science.

Jackie Hodgson (ÌÒÉ«ÊÓƵ) and Asher Flynn (Monash) have been awarded A$13,398 + £7,165 from the Monash-ÌÒÉ«ÊÓƵ Alliance Seed Fund for the project: Access to Justice: A Comparative Analysis of cuts to the civil and criminal Legal Aid systems in England, Wales and Victoria, August 2013 – June 2014.

The project brings together ÌÒÉ«ÊÓƵ colleagues Jackie Hodgson (PI) James Harrison, Andrew Williams and Nathalie Byrom (Co-Is) with Monash colleagues Asher Flynn (PI) Jude McCulloch, Bronwyn Naylor and Arie Freiberg (Co-Is). The study is a comparative analysis of the impact of cuts to the civil and criminal legal-aid systems operating in England, Wales and Victoria. This will be achieved through consultations with academic, legal and government/non-government stakeholders and the development of an online presence for external engagement. A conference will be held in ÌÒÉ«ÊÓƵ on 19 March 2014, with the participation of Monash colleagues. Within the framework of access to justice, the conference will bring together leading academics and practitioners to consider (i) the changing face of the legal profession; (ii) the lawyer-client relationship; and (iii) the broader social consequences of the cuts. A second event will be held in Monash in early July 2014, with the participation of ÌÒÉ«ÊÓƵ colleagues. The project will build international and comparative expertise with stakeholders, with a view to future funded research.

Philip Kaisary and Amaka Vanni have been accepted to participate in Harvard Law School’s Institute for Global Law and Policy (IGLP) 5th Workshop in Doha, Qatar. The workshop is an intensive residential program designed for young scholars and faculty from around the world developing innovative ideas and alternative approaches to issues of global law, economic policy and social justice in the aftermath of the economic crisis. The Workshop will bring together specialists from many fields focused on the intersections between law, economics and global policy.

The admissions process this year was extremely competitive, with more than 450 applications from 86 nations. As participants, Amaka and Philip will engage in debate and seek serious research collaboration. Amaka will discuss with participants her on-going PhD research on the TRIPS Agreement, Access to Medicine Debate and the Emerging Third World Jurisprudence while Philip will discuss the concept of "disaster justice" and the 2010 Haitian earthquake. The 2014 IGLP Workshop is to be held from January 3-11, 2014.

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The Early-Career Fellowship from the Independent Social Research Foundation (worth £48,000) provides funds for 12 months to enable a researcher to do interdisciplinary work that takes new approaches and suggests new solutions to real world social problems. Kim's project will focus on the ethics of sociability, the evils of social deprivation, and the merits of social human rights. In particular, it will look at the human rights implications of socially privative environments such as long-term solitary confinement in prison.

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'Caring about Care in a Global Market Place'

Williams's A Very British Killing was named winner of the £3,000 book award ahead of Colvin, the former Bishop of Edinburgh Richard Holloway, Pankaj Mishra, Raja Shehadeh, Carmen Bugan and Clive Stafford Smith. Organisers called it a "chilling, gripping book" which "unearths damning evidence of what happened" to Mousa, the receptionist who on 15 September 2003 was arrested in Basra and taken to a military base, where guards and army visitors kicked, punched and humiliated him before he was beaten to death.

Judges Nikita Lalwani, Arifa Akbar and Bakewell said that Williams, a law professor at the University of ÌÒÉ«ÊÓƵ and director of the , "had the courage to take on a case that has already received so much press coverage and to turn it into something far bigger and more shocking than we understood it to be".

"He dissects and analyses with a clear-eyed determination to unpick the lies from the truths of this case, yet, for all its forensic detail, the book grips us emotionally, and has as keen a sense of storytelling as a horror story or courtroom drama. Ultimately, the greatest achievement of this incendiary, eloquent and angry book is that it humanises Mousa beyond the iconic and infamous figure he has become in his death. It was written in the spirit of Orwell's journalism," they said.

The Orwell book prize is intended to discover the work which comes closest to George Orwell's ambition "to make political writing into an art". earlier this month, Williams wondered what Orwell himself "would have thought" about the Mousa case. "He wrote once that: 'It seems to me nonsense, in a period like our own, to think that one can avoid writing of such subjects.' His main target then was the evil of totalitarianism," wrote Williams. "But I would like to think his underlying aim was to challenge indifference to the suffering of others. That for me was the real devil which emerged amid the detail of my book."

Williams joins former winners of the prize including Francis Wheen, Fergal Keane and Tom Bingham.

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Professor Gary Watt delivered the inaugural Madam Justice Mary Southin Lecture at the  

Endowed by her friends and colleagues, the annual Madam Justice Mary Southin Lecture pays tribute to Madam Justice Southin's many contributions to the development of the common law in British Columbia. It is to address either the Law of Equity or British Columbia legal history, and it alternates between the University of British Columbia and the University of Victoria Law Faculties.

Professor Watt’s lecture was entitled:

Kimberley Brownlee

Kimberley was awarded a £37,000 Philip Leverhulme Prize. These prizes are designed to recognise and facilitate the work of outstanding young research scholars, who are making original and significant contributions to knowledge in their field with an international impact, and whose greatest achievements are expected to be still to come.

Kimberley Brownlee's research during her fellowship will focus on social human rights, and in particular the idea of a human right against social deprivation. The term ‘social deprivation’ refers to a persisting lack of minimally adequate opportunities for decent human contact and social inclusion. Social deprivation is a common experience in arenas of institutional segregation such as long-term medical quarantine and solitary confinement. It is also the most extreme variant of a more general, pervasive phenomenon of social isolation that includes people, many of whom are elderly or disabled, who are chronically, acutely lonely and unable to remedy their situation. This kind of deprivation is an important concern, particularly in western societies, given the individualistic bent of western culture, aging populations, and the ongoing use of isolating procedures in medicine, immigration, and criminal justice.

The Legal Regulation of Cohabitation examines hundreds of reported and unreported cases, as well as legislation, policy papers, debates in Parliament to show how the legal treatment of cohabiting couples has been transformed over the past four centuries – from punishment as fornicators in the seventeenth century to eventual acceptance as family in the late twentieth century.

Alongside this, drawing on thousands of newspaper reports and magazine articles, it charts how the language used to refer to cohabitation has changed over time – from the denunciatory phrases of the early part of the period, through the namelessness of cohabitation in the nineteenth century, wartime ‘unmarried wives’, the ‘living in sin’ of the mid-twentieth century, the ‘stable illicit unions’ of the Law Commission’s 1966 report on divorce, the ‘common-law wives’ of the 1970s, the ‘live-in lovers’ of the 1980s and early 1990s to the ‘partners’ of today.

These different terms both influenced and were influenced by policy debates and public perceptions of cohabitation. Law and language were also intertwined with the third key theme of the book – a reassessment of the incidence of cohabitation in past times. Having carried out innovative cohort studies of over 5,000 couples, the book provides new and more accurate evidence of the extent (or rather the rarity) of cohabitation in earlier centuries. For more information go to:

Progressive Corporate Governance for the 21st Century is a wide ranging and ambitious study of why corporate governance is the shape that it is, and how it can be better. The book sets out the emergence of shareholder primacy orientated corporate governance using a study of historical developments in the United Kingdom and the United States. Talbot sees shareholder primacy as a political choice made by governments, not a ‘natural’ feature of the inevitable market. She describes the periods of progressive corporate governance which governments promoted in the middle of the 20th century using a close examination of the theories of the company which then prevailed. She critically examines the rise of neoliberal theories on the company and corporate governance and argues that they have had a negative and regressive impact on social and economic development. In examining contemporary corporate governance she shows how regulatory styles as informed and described by prevailing regulatory theories, enables neoliberal outcomes. She illustrates how United Kingdom-derived corporate governance codes have informed the corporate governance initiatives of European and global institutions. From this she argues that neoliberalism has re-entered ex command transition economies through those United Kingdom and OECD inspired corporate governance Codes over a decade after the earlier failed and destructive neoliberal prescriptions for transition had been rejected. Throughout, Talbot argues that shareholder primacy has socially regressive outcomes and firmly takes a stand against current initiatives to enhance shareholder voting in such issues as director remuneration. The book concludes with a series of proposals to recalibrate the power between those involved in company activity; shareholders, directors and employees so that the public company can begin to work for the public and not shareholders.

Together with colleagues in four other EU states, Professor Jackie Hodgson has been awarded a European Commission Action grant of €375,000 for the project: Protecting Young Suspects in Interrogations: A ÌÒÉ«ÊÓƵ on Safeguards and Best Practice. The objective of this two year project is to strengthen the protection of young suspects during interrogation by the police in the EU. The project consists of a comparative empirical study of the different legal procedural safeguards in place in Belgium, England and Wales, Italy, Poland and the Netherlands. Based on these findings, this will be followed by professional training and recommendations for minimum EU rules and best practice.

The study follows on from Professor Hodgson’s current EU funded project, an empirical study of the procedural rights of suspects in police detention in the EU, leading to best practice recommendations.