Making children's needs knowable to law. This project addresses the growing concerns that the family law system is not adequately safeguarding children's wellbeing in parenting cases. Its development of an evidence-based framework for decision-making will facilitate the production of outcomes that will better support the wellbeing of families affected by relationship breakdown.
Construing Statutes: The Interaction between a Statute’s Linguistic Content and Principles of Statutory Interpretation. This project aims to identify the factors that determine what legal effect a statutory provision has; what effect it has on the content of the law; in cases where its legal effect is modified by another legal rule or principle. Such cases are commonplace, but the way in which statutory provisions interact with other legal rules or principles is poorly understood. The outcome of ....Construing Statutes: The Interaction between a Statute’s Linguistic Content and Principles of Statutory Interpretation. This project aims to identify the factors that determine what legal effect a statutory provision has; what effect it has on the content of the law; in cases where its legal effect is modified by another legal rule or principle. Such cases are commonplace, but the way in which statutory provisions interact with other legal rules or principles is poorly understood. The outcome of this project will be a general methodology for construing Australian statutes which can resolve problems that existing methodologies cannot. This will provide much-needed guidance to judges, and will advance our understanding of important legal and political issues concerning the effect that statutory provisions have on the content of the law.Read moreRead less
Participation in the administration of justice: deaf citizens as jurors. This project will pioneer international research on legal signed language interpreting and jury service; the results are likely to innovate law reform. The expected outcome will be to overturn previously held common law that deaf people cannot serve as jurors due to having an interpreter as the 13th person in the jury room as well as confidentiality issues.