Justice as a commodity

Those of us who raised concerns were clearly troublemakers bent on destroying the school and its vision from within. They have to be banished, and they are.

There is a seeming paradox in this. How is it that the socio-legal faction in the Law School at the University of Canberra acts in the same way that their black letter and hard law colleagues in the ascendancy in most other law Schools act.

An easy answer would be that they wear the badge of socio-legal research and enquiry but are really just, as Thornton identifies, black letter lawyers who throw in a bit of social analysis.

A better answer I think would emerge out of looking at the degeneration of the ALP over the last 30 years and its embrace of neoliberalism to understand that the soft left in legal academia has undergone the same transformation.

They are 'critical' scholars in the neoliberal tradition.

They experiment with 'markets'. In the process of destroying the commercial law strength of the School, the market leftists have concocted some bizarre legal studies program to bring in money. It is, as one would expect from people not really attuned to the market, a failure, as is their attempt to set up a Law in Action course.

These Keynesian neoliberals cannot escape their environment – the neoliberal employment conditions that Stephen Parker, the former leftist and now Vice Chancellor of the University of Canberra, has imposed on the community of scholars there.

These 7 year contracts lock in precariousness of employment. They mean that the legal scholars employed under this regime since 2009 have at best seven years to prove themselves fit to be Associate Professors or otherwise their contracts can or will be terminated, sometimes after three or five years on review.

Precarity is a neoliberal's wet dream. The problem is that its seed falls upon the ground. It is secure employment which produces better workers., better researchers, better results, not a mad rush to prove oneself in a short period of time to be a super star.

The neoliberal legal system rewards those who can turn out pieces of dross and fluke an occasional grant. It rewards those who get good student responses which in tun creates pressure for grade inflation for example.

The other thing about precarious employment is it employs the young, the gullible, those who are malleable and compliant and in truth yes men and women for the neoliberal management. Neoliberalism recruits in its own image.

The drive to increase student enrolments (paraded as increasing access to university and hence a matter of equity but in reality all about bringing in money and makign money within increasing staff levels or improving infrastructure) has resulted in students whose capacity to undertake University study must be called into question.