School of Law

University of New England

2020 Kirby Seminar Series

 

Professor Kim Rubenstein,

Faculty of Business, Governance and Law University of Canberra

“Current Issues in Australian Citizenship”

Via Zoom Webinar Thursday 27 August 2020 at 1pm AEST
If interested, and to obtain an individual link for attendance, please register for this Kirby Seminar at:
https://une-au.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_NSlhccwUTNqqQCKT9viO6w

 

In this Kirby seminar, Professor Kim Rubenstein will draw together a mix of ‘current issues’ that involve questions of Australian citizenship and identity: the High Court decisions of Love and Thoms v the Commonwealth [2020] HCA 3 (11 February 2020)  the Palace Letters (Hocking v Director General of the National Archives of Australia [2020] HCA 19 (29 May 2020) ) and the forthcoming High Court matter in which Zehra Duman, an Australian born woman in a refugee camp, has initiated proceedings around the constitutionality of the stripping of citizenship from dual citizens.

Professor Rubenstein will tie each of these cases into her work around citizenship and the Australian constitution, and her view, that the reasons for the failure to include Australian citizenship in the framing of the Constitution are foundational to all of these current matters.

Kim Rubenstein is a Professor in the Faculty of Business, Government and Law and Co Director of the 50/50 by 2030 Foundation at the University of Canberra.  A graduate of the University of Melbourne and Harvard University, she is Australia’s leading expert on citizenship, both around its formal legal status and in law’s intersection with broader normative notions of citizenship as membership and participation.  This has led to her scholarship around gender and public law, which includes her legal work and her oral history work around women lawyers’ contributions in the public sphere.  She was the Director of the Centre for International and Public law at the ANU from 2006-2015 and the Inaugural Convener of the ANU Gender Institute from 2011-2012.  She is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Law and the Australia Academy of Social Sciences.