2023 Article/Chapter Prize Winner

Abstract: The urgent, planetary-scaled concerns of the Anthropocene present unique challenges for orthodox judging practices. Drawing upon wild law tenets, insights from ecocritical theorists, and the interdisciplinary response to the concept and dilemmas of the Anthropocene, this chapter explores the potential scale and scope of wild judging in the Anthropocene: judging in which more-than-human perspectives and sensibilities are accorded equal weight with human-centred concerns, and the wellbeing of the yet-to-be-born is a preeminent consideration. Judging wildly requires a break with legal tradition, an adventurous leaping into the uncanny and the unknown, an imaginative recasting. In this exercise, writers of speculative and ecological fiction play an indispensable role.

2023 Article/Chapter Prize ECR Winner

Abstract: This is an account of a reading project that began in February 2020. Australia was burning, a pandemic was simmering, the two of us were early in our PhD journeys at the Melbourne Law School. Already, we felt exhausted by critical theory which seemed to amplify the affects we felt all too intensely. Our reading project began as an attempt to find and inhabit texts that might move beyond critique, that might allow us to find wonder and vitality in legal theory. Taking up the literary critic Rita Felski’s invitation to craft a post-critical reading practice, our reading list evolved iteratively to encompass themes and concerns that we identified as possibly correlating with said practice. It evolved too, in conversation with Melbourne, as the city journeyed through different stages of the pandemic. Constantly changing restrictions changed the ways in which we met and conversed, influencing in turn the texts we chose to read and the manner in which we read them. In this account, we pay attention to the time and place of our encounters with these interlocutors, and to the feelings these encounters generated. As such, this article takes the form of a series of (revised) diary entries: first written in 2020, then revisited in the corresponding months of 2021. What we hope emerges from these entries is a sense of how these theoretical texts train us to live in a world undergoing a compounding series of crises – and, perhaps, to imagine that world otherwise. In a more jurisprudential register, we hope that our experiment will identify the methods these texts might give us for (re-)engaging with law in a spirit of wonder and vitality.