^{Photo: John Storey}

What is ‘Legal intersections research’?

LIRC fosters and promotes a range of research programs and endeavours at law’s edges. We study law as a technique, as a way of knowing and as a social force, and question those ways law operates and defines itself.

Law is a way of defining boundaries: between itself and other techniques, and between legal regimes. Law as a technique raises questions of its intersections with other ways of arguing, studying, recording and deciding contentious issues. These may include ethical, political or bureaucratic means. LIRC challenges those disciplinary and jurisdictional boundaries.

As a way of knowing, law is both modest and supremely imperialistic. Behind its appearance as a mere technique, law has absorbed and influenced ways of thinking throughout the western tradition and in dealings with other societies. In all cultural traditions law is deeply entwined with epistemology. LIRC seeks to learn from these ways of knowing, and to understand how they work.

Law is a potent social force. Constantly overflowing its self-defined boundaries, law regulates, coerces and justifies actions of states and insurgents, traders and thieves, producers and consumers. Indeed, law operates by setting the borders between these sets of actors. LIRC explores and questions these operations.

Law is nothing but the things people do in its name. LIRC investigates the people, the things they do, and the name of ‘law’.

How does LIRC do it?

The Legal Intersections Research Centre promotes intersectional research around law by

• promoting global networks of researchers

• working to enhance legal intersectional research in Australia with other centres, associations and journals devoted to law’s intersections with society, culture and feminism

• fostering innovative and relevant research across the University of Wollongong, in the Faculty of Law and more broadly.

LIRC works towards this by

• organising events such as seminars, conferences and workshops

• publishing the international journal Law Text Culture

• hosting visits by researchers of international standing

• promoting publicly accessible research activities

• fostering collegial relationships among members of LIRC

• attracting and supporting higher degree research students