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Prof. Shane Chalmers

Assistant Professor

PhD, Australian National University, 2016
LLM, McGill University, 2011
LLB (Hons), University of Adelaide, 2010
BIntSt, University of Adelaide, 2007

Biography

Shane Chalmers joined the University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law as an Assistant Professor in 2023. He researches and teaches across ‘law and the humanities’, with a critical focus on the endurance of European colonialism in laws and societies today. His work has contributed to the sub-fields of law and colonialism, law and literature, international law and development, and critical legal theory.

Shane is also an Adjunct Associate Professor at Adelaide Law School; a long-standing member and currently a Vice President of the Law, Literature and Humanities Association of Australasia; and Book Review Editor of Law & Literature journal. He has previously worked at Adelaide Law School (2021-2023) and Melbourne Law School (2017-2021).

Shane’s major publications include The Colonial Legal Imaginary: A Carnivalesque Jurisprudence (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming), 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 ‘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.

He is also author of Liberia and the Dialectic of Law: Critical Theory, Pluralism, and the Rule of Law (Routledge, 2018), which 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.

He is also editor of The Routledge Handbook of International Law and Humanities (Routledge, 2021) wih Sundhya Pahuja, and a special issue of Law & Literature on “Colonial Legal Imaginaries | Southern Literary Futures”, vol 36, no 2 (2024) with Desmond Manderson.

His current projects include:

The Colonial Imaginary and the Authority of Law in British Hong Kong and the Straits Settlements: a new multi-year research project that investigates the relationship between colonial law, art, and politics in British Hong Kong and the Straits Settlements, in order to better understand the complexities of colonisation and processes of decolonisation in the region. Two research questions guide the project. (1) How might a British colonial imaginary, with its repertoire of cultural representations, have sustained the authority of colonial law in Hong Kong and the Straits Settlements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries? (2) How might the creation and dissemination of artworks have undermined the authority of British colonial law across this region, by disrupting its imperial representations? 

Legal Imaginaries Across the Asia Pacific: a collaboration with colleagues at the Australian National University, National University of Singapore, University of British Columbia, and University of Wollongong, which recentres the field of ‘law and literature’ in the Asia Pacific, and joins and strengthens a network of scholars who are working towards non-colonial futures across the region in this field.

Research Area

  • Law and Humanities
  • Law and Colonialism
  • Law and Literature
  • Legal Theory (esp Critical Traditions)
  • International Law and Development


Publications
SSRN
ORCID
HKU Scholar Hub


Publications
SSRN
ORCID
HKU Scholar Hub

Research Area

  • Law and Humanities
  • Law and Colonialism
  • Law and Literature
  • Legal Theory (esp Critical Traditions)
  • International Law and Development

Publications

Monographs

  • Shane Chalmers, The Colonial Legal Imaginary: A Carnivalesque Jurisprudence (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming)

  • Shane Chalmers, Liberia and the Dialectic of Law: Critical Theory, Pluralism, and the Rule of Law (Routledge, 2018)

 

Edited collections

  • Shane Chalmers and Desmond Manderson (eds), “Colonial Legal Imaginaries | Southern Literary Futures”, Law & Literature, vol 36, no 2 (2024)

  • Shane Chalmers and Sundhya Pahuja (eds), Routledge Handbook of International Law and the Humanities (Routledge, 2021)

 

Refereed articles

  • Shane Chalmers and Desmond Manderson, “Vortext”, Law & Literature, vol 36, no 2 (2024): 171-182

  • Shane Chalmers, “The Utopian Law and Literature of Systematic Colonisation”, Law & Literature, vol 35.2 (2023, online 2022): 179-199

  • Shane Chalmers, “Metaphoric Sovereignty and the Australian Settler Colonial State”, Law Text Culture, vol 26 (2022): 36-57

  • Shane Chalmers, “The Utopian Law and Literature of Systematic Colonisation”, Law & Literature, online (2022)

  • Shane Chalmers, “The Festival as Constitutional Event and as Jurisdictional Encounter: Colonial Victoria and the Independent Order of Black Fellows”, Griffith Law Review, vol 30, no 4 (2021): 557-577

  • Shane Chalmers, “Native Dignity”, Griffith Law Review, vol 29, no 2 (2020): 175-198

  • Shane Chalmers, “Clothes Maketh the Man: Mimesis, Laughter, and the Colonial Rule of Law”, Index, vol 2 (2020): 83-104

  • Shane Chalmers, “Terra Nullius? Temporal Legal Pluralism in an Australian Colony”, Social & Legal Studies, vol 29, no 4 (2020, online 2019): 463-485

  • Shane Chalmers, “The Mythology of International Rule-of-Law Promotion”, Law & Social Inquiry, vol 44, no 4 (2019): 957-986

  • Shane Chalmers, “Negative Mythology”, Law and Critique, vol 31, no 1 (2020, online 2019): 59-72

  • Shane Chalmers, “The Chameleon Subject: Representation, Law, and the Problem of Living Dead”, Law, Culture and the Humanities, online (2018)

  • Shane Chalmers, “Law’s Pluralism: Getting to the Heart of the Rule of Law”, Law, Culture and the Humanities, vol 17, no 2 (2021, online 2017): 280-301

  • Shane Chalmers, “Civil Death in the Dominion of Freedom: Liberia and the Logic of Capital”, Law and Critique, vol 28, no 2 (2017): 145-165

  • Shane Chalmers, “The Beginning of Human Rights: The Ritual of the Preamble to Law”, Humanity, vol 9, no 1 (2018, online 2015): 107-125

  • Shane Chalmers, “Law’s Imaginary Life on the Ground: Scenes of the Rule of Law in Liberia”, Law and Literature, vol 27, no 2 (2015): 179-198

  • Shane Chalmers and Jeremy Farrall, “Securing the Rule of Law through UN Peace Operations”, Max Planck Yearbook of United Nations Law, vol 18 (2014): 217-248

 

Book chapters

  • Shane Chalmers and Sundhya Pahuja, “Development”, in A Anghie, BS Chimni, M Fakhri, K Mickelson, and V Nesiah (eds), Research Handbook on Third World Approaches to International Law (Edward Elgar, in press)

  • Shane Chalmers, “A Mitologia da Promoção Internacional do Rule of Law”, in Michelle Ratton Sanchez Badin (ed), Direito e Desenvolvimento em Tradução (FGV Direito SP, 2024: open access)

  • Shane Chalmers, “The Rule of Law and International Development”, in Ruth Buchanan, Luis Eslava, and Sundhya Pahuja (eds), Oxford Handbook of International Law and Development (Oxford University Press, 2023)

  • Shane Chalmers, “Colonialism and Law”, in Jan Smits, Jaakko Husa, Madalena Narciso, and Catherine Valcke (eds), Elgar Encyclopedia of Comparative Law (Edward Elgar, 2023)

  • Shane Chalmers and Sundhya Pahuja, “Practice, Craft and Ethos: Inheriting a Tradition”, in Shane Chalmers and Sundhya Pahuja (eds), Routledge Handbook of International Law and the Humanities (Routledge, 2021)

  • Shane Chalmers and Sundhya Pahuja, “(Economic) Development and the Rule of Law”, in Jens Meierhenrich and Martin Loughlin (eds), The Cambridge Companion to the Rule of Law (CUP, 2021)

  • Shane Chalmers, “The Visual Force of Justice in the Making of Liberia”, in Desmond Manderson (ed), Law and the Visual: Representations, Technologies, and Critique (University of Toronto Press, 2018)

Book reviews

  • Shane Chalmers, “the sentimental life of international law: literature, language, and longing in world politics by Gerry Simpson”, Law & Literature, vol 35, no 3 (2023): 536-539

  • Shane Chalmers, “Shari‘a, Inshallah: Finding God in Somali Legal Politics by Mark Fathi Massoud”, Journal of Modern African Studies, vol 60, no 3 (2022): 421-422

  • Shane Chalmers, “Expressive Insurgency: Theft is Property! Dispossession and Critical Theory by Robert Nichols”, Theory & Event, vol 24, no 1 (2021): 411-414