LAW5501 · Law and repair

Overview

Law is not only a system of rules and remedies; it is also a set of forms through which we imagine the world, and which we can repair when they fall short. This unit examines law’s central forms (legislation, judgments, contracts, testimony and proceedings) and the traditions of reimagining and rewriting them. You will learn to read each form for the world it imagines: who appears in it, who is missing, and what it assumes about how life is lived. You will then study how these forms have been repaired or rewritten, including feminist redrafting of statutes, alternative judgments, contracts recognising emerging relationships, and proceedings staged to hear what courts have not. Each module focuses on a single legal form, how it works and what it imagines, and how it has been repaired. You will practise two complementary modes of reading: critically, asking what a legal form leaves out; and reparatively, asking what it makes possible and for whom. The unit is as practical as it is conceptual: rewriting a statute or judgment requires precision drafting, redrafting a contract is exacting transactional work, and reading a form for its assumptions is core to legal interpretation and advice. The drafting and interpretive skills you will build are central to legal practice across public and private law.

Offerings

Assessment

The Handbook does not list a final examination among the assessment items. That is not a guarantee there is none.

Assessment details may change. Please refer to the assessment information in Moodle closer to the start of the teaching period.

Requisites

The Handbook lists no prerequisite, corequisite or prohibition for this unit.

Learning outcomes

1. Demonstrate high-level understanding of the work performed by core legal forms such as legislation, judgments, contracts, testimony, and proceedings by discussing persuasively and in detail how each generates, constrains and reshapes legal relations.
2. Apply a comprehensive range of complementary critical and reparative frameworks to the analysis of legal texts, forms and processes.
3. Critically evaluate attempts to repair and reimagine legal forms, including rewritten legislation and judgments, novel agreements, and staged proceedings, and their assumptions, limitations and effects.
4. Create a detailed plan and produce a repaired legal form, supported by a clear, compelling and coherent critical analysis that draws on relevant scholarship and primary materials.

Workload

Minimum total expected workload to achieve the learning outcomes for this unit comprise of a mixture of scheduled learning activities and independent study applicable to a 6 credit point unit. Learning activities may include a combination of teacher directed learning, peer directed learning, and online engagement.

Student experience, not official rules. Nothing here changes what the Handbook says.