Balancing Life and Law by Prof. Margaret Thornton (ANU)
Opublikowano: November 28, 2016 Autor: M J
On 25th Nov. Professor Margaret Thorton gave a speech at UTS about how is it for a woman to take the legal career path..
Here’s some information to that
BALANCING LAW AND LIFE
(ARC DP 120104785)
Prof Margaret Thornton
The feminisation of wage labour has been marked all over the world since the 1990s and working women have demanded that cognisance be taken of the fact that they are still expected to take primary responsibility for caring for others. However, feminisation has collided with the ascendancy of neoliberal governmentality in which wealth creation and profit maximisation are the primary aims, with scant regard for worker wellbeing.
This project considers the conflict in the context of Australian corporate law firms. Competition policy has been embraced by the legal profession, which has resulted in a raft of reforms, including globalisation. Billable hours operate as a disciplinary technology designed to maximise lawyer productivity but induce stress because of the pressure to meet targets. Indeed, the attrition rate of women from private firms is an extraordinarily high 50% in the first five years. Flexible work was thought to be the solution as an internet connection & mobile phone are all that are required to enable work to be undertaken anywhere at any time. However, rather than the boon it was hoped to be, the shift from face time to virtual time has blurred the boundary between work and life. The most significant finding from this project is that work is colonising the private sphere and the realm of intimacy.
Bio:
MARGARET THORNTON is Professor of Law at the Australian National University. She has degrees from Sydney, UNSW and Yale, and is a Barrister of the Supreme Court of NSW and the High Court of Australia. She formerly occupied the Richard McGarvie Chair of Socio-Legal Studies at La Trobe University and has held visiting fellowships at Oxford, London, Columbia, Sydney and York, Canada. She has published extensively on issues relating to women and the law, including the only book-length study of women and the legal profession in Australia: Dissonance and Distrust: Women and the Legal Profession, Oxford University Press, 1996 (also published in Chinese by the Law Press, Beijing, 2001). Her most recent book is Privatising the Public University: The Case of Law, Routledge, London, 2012 Her current research project, ?Balancing Law and Life? entails a study of gender and corporate law firms and is funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant, 2012-14. She is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia and a Foundation Fellow of the Australian Academy of Law.
