Nicole Rogers

The Prime Minister as puppet: taking Howard to the High Court

Often, for those of us who teach law, it is our students who plant the seed for an idea, a paper, an article or even a lawsuit. The idea for this article came from a question asked by a fi rst year constitutional law student shortly after the Prime Minister, John Howard, announced that Australia would join in the US-led war on Iraq. She had read through the Constitution and had come across s 44(i). She asked why it was that John Howard was not disqualifi ed from continuing to sit as a Member of Parliament due to his acknowledgment of allegiance to a foreign power.

The Australian wild law judgement project

172 — AltLJ Vol 39:3 2014 The development of an earth or wild jurisprudence requires us to interrogate from an ecological perspective the sacred texts of law, its regulatory instruments and its judgments, and to acknowledge some of the missing voices and perspectives: those belonging to other species and future generations and perhaps, even more holistically, the voice of Gaia herself. However in developing such a jurisprudence we need to do more than merely gesture towards the multiple silences and omissions. We need to provide constructive suggestions for a way forward.

Law and liberty in a time of climate change

In this article I examine the intersection between human rights and climate change, and consider whether, in fact, fundamental human rights are or would be jeopardised by a concerted attempt on the part of Western governments to curb carbon emissions. I draw comparisons with the war on terror, and discuss the implications of a possible war on climate change for democracy and the rule of law. My argument is that any curtailment of human rights must be placed in perspective. It is increasingly apparent that, if left unchecked, climate change will have a catastrophic impact upon human rights. Thus, the requirement for urgent action on climate change arises as much from a human rights perspective as from a more wholistic environmental perspective.

Activism and the academy

200 — AltLJ Vol 33:4 2008 While attending a conference in 2006, I was struck by a question directed towards a panel of activists from an audience comprised almost exclusively of academics. A member of the audience asked earnestly what she and others could do, as academics, to support activists. I was puzzled by her assumption that academics and activists fall into two distinct categories but then, in my view, any distinction between academics and activists is an artificial one. Yet, artificial as it may be, an ‘apartheid of knowledges’ is ‘deeply entrenched’ in the academy. Conquergood describes this as ‘the difference between thinking and doing, interpreting and making, conceptualizing and creating.’