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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 is a scholar of law and the humanities, with a critical focus on the legacies of European colonialism for laws and societies today. His work has 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.

Shane 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.

Shane 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.

Shane 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”.

Research Area

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


Publications
SSRN
ORCID
HKU Scholar Hub


Publications
SSRN
ORCID
HKU Scholar Hub

Research Area

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

Publications

Monographs

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

 

Edited volumes

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

 

Refereed articles

  • 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, “The Inequity of Development: Reading the World Bank’s Turn to Inequality”, in Antony Anghie, et al (eds), Handbook of Third World Approaches to International Law (Edward Elgar) [accepted]
  • Shane Chalmers, “A Mitologia da Promoção Internacional do Rule of Law”, in Michelle Ratton Sanchez Badin (ed), Direito e Desenvolvimento em Tradução (FGV Press) [in press]
  • 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 (OUP) [in press]
  • 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, “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