HKU Law Welcomes Prof. Valeria Vázquez Guevara

Welcome to Prof. Valeria Vázquez Guevara, who joins the Faculty of Law as an Assistant Professor.

Valeria researches and teaches across the areas of international law, law-and-humanities, and land/property law. Valeria’s research engages with law-and-humanities methodologies to address questions of international law, its institutions, contestations, and geopolitical implications, especially between North-South and South-South actors. The research builds on Valeria’s personal and professional experiences in international development and peacebuilding projects in El Salvador, Spain, the Basque Country, and South Africa.

Valeria is the author of Truth Commissions and International Law (Cambridge University Press, in press). The book examines how Truth Commissions deal with the plurality of (rival) accounts that exist across communities to establish an authoritative account of the past. It expands on her doctoral thesis at Melbourne Law School, which won the University of Melbourne Chancellor’s Prize for Excellence in the PhD Thesis and Melbourne Law School’s Harold Luntz Prize for Best Doctoral Thesis. Valeria’s next major research project focuses on the historical and contemporary relationship between ASEAN and international law, with a particular focus on land tenure issues.

Valeria serves as member of the executive committee of the Law, Literature and Humanities Association of Australasia, and as co-convener of the Critical Approaches to International Law Interest Group of the European Society of International Law (ESIL). Previously, Valeria has served as co-chair of the History and Theory of International Law Interest Group of the Australian and New Zealand Society of International Law (2022-2025), and as Managing Editor and Editorial Board member of the Australian Feminist Law Journal (2021-2023).

Scott Veitch on Friendship, Labour, Attention: Thinking with Simone Weil (CLT)

"What Matters?"
Scott Veitch
Critical Legal Thinking
Published online: January 2025

As part of a series on "Friendship, Labour, Attention: Thinking with Simone Weil" co-edited by Scott Veitch (HKU) and Maksymilian Del Mar (QMU London), Scott Veitch's contribution - 'What Matters?' - is here: 

Please click here to view full text.

Scott Veitch et al on The Inhuman in the Human (CLT)

"The Inhuman in the Human"
Kathleen Birrell, Daniel Matthews and Scott Veitch
Critical Legal Thinking
Published online: 16 Sep 2024

"Law and the Inhuman" was the title of a workshop held at the University of Tilburg Law School in April this year. It addressed themes of climate change and the Anthropocene, of non-human agency, and of how the category of the human is becoming increasingly destabilized in legal and political thought and practice. In the dialogue linked here Professor Scott Veitch (HKU Law) and Dr Daniel Matthews (formerly HKU Law, now at Warwick University) explore the general theme through a discussion of "The Inhuman in the Human".

Please click here to view full text.

HKU Law Welcomes Dr Shane Chalmers, Assistant Professor

Welcome to Dr Shane Chalmers who joined the Faculty of Law as an Assistant Professor of Law! Dr Chalmers, PhD, Australian National University, 2016, LLM, McGill University, 2011, LLB (Hons), University of Adelaide, 2010, BIntSt, University of Adelaide, 2007, a scholar of law and the humanities, has a critical focus on the legacies of European colonialism for laws and societies today. His work has significantly contributed to the sub-fields of law and colonialism, law and development, and critical legal theory. He is also a long-standing member, and currently a Vice President, of the Law, Literature and Humanities Association of Australasia.

     Dr Chalmers is the author of Liberia and the Dialectic of Law: Critical Theory, Pluralism, and the Rule of Law (Routledge, 2018). The book, based on his doctoral thesis, examines the legal formation of Liberia, from its conception as an idea of liberty in the nineteenth century, through its establishment as a republic in the twentieth century, to its post-war reconstruction at the beginning of the twenty-first century with assistance of an international intervention to establish a state based on the rule of law. The book contributes a critical understanding of the role of law in the formation of Liberia, and the implications of the state’s historical formation for law and justice today, in Liberia and other international development contexts.
     Dr Chalmers is currently completing a second monograph, The Antipodes: A Carnivalesque Jurisprudence of a Settler Colonial Imaginary, which examines the legal imaginary that shaped and was shaped by the colonisation of Australia in the nineteenth century. The book shows how this imaginary worked to dispossess, dehumanise, and disempower First Nations through its forms of property, dignity, and sovereignty; and it aims to unsettle these legal forms, and open them up to reimagination. In doing so, it develops a new kind of jurisprudence – a carnivalesque jurisprudence – which uses the Bakhtinian figures of the clown, the fool, and the rogue to examine and represent the colonial legal imaginary, using an idiom of laughter that is critically potent as well as generative.
     Since joining the University of Hong Kong, Shane’s research has begun to focus on how an imperial imaginary sustained the authority of law in British colonies in East and Southeast Asia, and how disruptions within this imaginary by local artists worked to disrupt the legal authority of the British colonists.
     Dr Chalmers is also editor (with Sundhya Pahuja) of The Routledge Handbook of International Law and the Humanities (Routledge, 2021); and he is currently editing a collection of essays (with Desmond Manderson) on “Colonial Legal Imaginaries | Southern Literary Futures”.
     His Research areas include:

•          Law and Humanities
•          Law and Colonialism
•          International Law and Development
•          Critical Legal Theory

Elaine Yim (MPhil 2021) on A Buck-Passing Account of ‘Moral Equality’ (Res Publica)

"A Buck-Passing Account of ‘Moral Equality’"

Elaine Yim (MPhil 2021) 

Res Publica , Volume 27, pp. 25–40

Published in 2021

Abstract: The belief that all human beings are ‘moral equals’ is widespread within the canon of Western liberal philosophy. However, it is unclear precisely what ‘moral equality’ or its associate terms mean, what grounds our ‘moral equality’ and what the implications of being ‘moral equals’ are. In this paper, I distinguish between three ways of understanding ‘moral equality’: the ‘buck-passing’, ‘explanatory’ and ‘reverse-explanatory’ accounts. The buck-passing account of moral equality is in parallel with Scanlon’s buck-passing account of value. It holds that ‘moral equality’ is not a metaphysically fundamental concept and simply amounts to having other properties shared equally by all human beings that constitute the reasons for why we ought to treat all human beings equally in certain respects. The explanatory account understands the concept of ‘moral equality’ as metaphysically fundamental and explanatory of why human beings who are the same in certain respects have the same entitlement to x. The reverse-explanatory account also sees ‘moral equality’ as metaphysically fundamental but holds that the explanatory relationship goes the other way round: moral equality is explained by how we ought to act. I argue that the buck-passing account is a more accurate way of understanding moral equality.

Douglas Arner et al on Regulating Artificial Intelligence in Finance: Putting the Human in the Loop (Sydney Law Review)

"Regulating Artificial Intelligence in Finance: Putting the Human in the Loop"
Buckley, Ross P.; Zetzsche, Dirk A.; Arner, Douglas W.; Tang, Brian W.

Sydney Law Review,  Vol. 43 Issue 1, pp. 43-81

Published in March 2021

Abstract: This article develops a framework for understanding and addressing the increasing role of artificial intelligence ('AI') in finance. It focuses on human responsibility as central to addressing the AI 'black box' problem -- that is, the risk of an AI producing undesirable results that are unrecognised or unanticipated due to people's difficulties in understanding the internal workings of an AI or as a result of the AI's independent operation outside human supervision or involvement. After mapping the various use cases of AI in finance and explaining its rapid development, we highlight the range of potential issues and regulatory challenges concerning financial services AI and the tools available to address them. We argue that the most effective regulatory approaches to addressing the role of AI in finance bring humans into the loop through personal responsibility regimes, thus eliminating the black box argument as a defence to responsibility and legal liability for AI operations and decisions.

Law and Humanities Summer School, The University of Hong Kong, 8-13 June 2020 (Applications Deadline: 6 Jan 2020)

Law and Humanities Summer School

Faculty of Law and Faculty of Arts

8-13 June 2020

ABOUT

The Faculty of Law and the Faculty of Arts at the University of Hong Kong will hold its first law and humanities summer school, 8-13 June 2020. This week-long event is open to post-graduate research students and early career academics from any discipline, based anywhere in the world, who are working at the intersection of law and the humanities. Summer school participants will take two intensive seminar series led by Alison Young, Francine V. McNiff Professor of Criminology at the University of Melbourne and James Martel, Professor of Political Science at San Francisco State University. In addition, there will be sessions on interdisciplinary methodologies, research and writing skills, as well as cultural and social events. This is a fantastic opportunity to work with two of the world’s leading law and humanities scholars, to develop your research and writing skills, expand your knowledge and learn from your peers in the global community of law and humanities researchers.

The seminar series

James Martel: How the law can undo what the law does

This course will consider the notion of law when it is not merely understood in its black letter, rationalist sense. The opposite of such a form of law is not necessarily chaos or nihilism but can have its own creative, contingent and positive forms. Thinking about law in this other, anarchist and decentralized sense allows us to imagine what is common to all forms of law even laws that serve to upend and contest the law as it is usually considered. In thinking about this kind of law, we will engage with a range of thinkers including Walter Benjamin, Giorgio Agamben and Fred Moten.

Alison Young: Imagining Justice in the City

Increasing urbanization means that more and more people live and work in urban centres, and increasing urban populations present particular challenges for social organisation and urban planning, but also for law: how do we imagine a just city in times of increasing population density and social inequality? In this course, we will examine a range of ways of thinking about justice in the city, including concepts of affect, urban encounters, the precariat, ambience and atmosphere, and the lawscape, drawing on the work of Ananya Roy, Sarah Keenan, Ben Anderson, Andreas Phillippopoulos-Mihailopoulos, Guy Standing, Peter Adey and others. A range of case studies will be utilised, including debates around urban aesthetics (and how they are regulated by law); how law responds to visible precarity; and the relationship between city and citizenship. 

Summer school participants will take both seminar series. Participants will be sent reading materials in advance. All reading and preparation must be completed before the summer school begins.

HOW TO APPLY

The summer school is open to post-graduate researchers and early career academics working in any discipline. Your current work should engage with law and the humanities, broadly conceived, and may include (though need not be limited to): legal, critical, cultural or political theory; law and literature; law and film; law and aesthetics; legal history; post-colonial studies; feminist legal studies; critical legal studies; critical race theory; the anthropology of law; law and geography.

Please complete the application form by clicking here

Deadline for applications: 6th January 2020

For any inquiries please contact Dr Daniel Matthews (Faculty of Law, HKU) at danmat@hku.hk.