Teaching Law
““I enjoyed, learned from, and was greatly impressed with, your teaching. You have a wonderful manner – friendly, calm, authoritative and helpful. Your classes are well structured, you engage effectively with students, and you adroitly facilitate their engagement with you and each other. You explain difficult material with clarity and nuance. There is no doubt that, by the end of each class, you have enhanced your students’ understanding of the key issues and their ability to assess and critique them”
Assessment of my pedagogy by Professor Andrew Christie, Melbourne Law School, as part of the Teaching Mentorship program at MLS
Pedagogy is a two-way street. Teaching is an act of learning. I am particularly invested in how we might bring the self into the space of the classroom, in a manner that actively interrogates hierarchy and transforms learning into a dialogic process.
My research-led courses such as ‘Law, Love and Literature’, ‘Legal Theatre’ and ‘Queer Jurisprudence’ have invaluably informed my work on these topics. In my teaching of core law subjects such as Contracts and Property, I orient my students towards finding ways of relating with the law, both in terms of focusing on the human stories behind legal doctrine, while also increasing student awareness of the manner in which the legal materials that we study seep into their everyday life.
Below, you will find the course manuals for some of the elective courses I have offered, along with articles reflecting on my pedagogy. For a complete list of the courses I have offered, please refer to my CV.
Queer Jurisprudence, Melbourne Law School (2022)
Offered to JD students as part of the Legal Research subject, this course encouraged a slant-wise approach to thinking about the topic of queer jurisprudence: not, as a first parsing of the phrase might suggest, a course about the legal regulation of non-heterosexual relations. Instead, we approached queerness as the open mesh of possibilities that become available to us when we transgress the normal, and jurisprudence as a training in lawful conduct that we might acquire from a diversity of sources which may or may not be conventionally considered “legal. Bringing these terms in relation to each other allowed us to explore a range of expressions of law that are playful and subversive.
Exploring Gender & Sexuality Law through Performance JGLS, Sonepat (2018-2019)
This was a year-long course that focused on using theatre to engage with the law relating to gender and sexuality. In the first semester, we studied plays that focused on different aspects of the regulation of gender and sexuality, following which students were guided towards creating a series of theatrical texts that served as legal critique. In the second semester, these texts were developed into theatrical performances staged by the students. We explored how elements like stage design, lighting, and sound can interact to highlight and present different kinds of messages to an audience.
Justice in the Works of Shakespeare, NLSIU, Bangalore (2016)
The law and ideas of justice play an essential role in much of Shakespeare’s work. Characters often refer to contemporary laws and legal institutions, while many plays raise larger questions about the many possible trajectories of (in)justice. This course examined four iconic plays: the tragedies Macbeth and Othello, and the comedies A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Much Ado About Nothing to examine how they raise questions ranging from the conflict between reason and emotion in judgment, to the unreliability of ocular proof as a form of evidence.
Law, Love and Literature, National Law University, Delhi (2016)
How do we capture the figures of law and love in conversation with each other? What are the different routes that a theory of law and love can take? This seminar aims to map out a few, taking a survey of prose, poetry and academic literature. Both legal and literary texts constitute discourses that reflect and construct our reality; both are embedded in their larger cultural contexts, which is made of more than language. For a law student, bringing the two discourses together in the study of law and literature can mean opening up challenging new ways of thinking about the law.
Coming Up ….
I’ll be teaching Equity and Trusts and Australian Family Law and Society across 2024 at La Trobe Law School. I’m also brewing up ideas for new courses that may or may not involve a certain Eras-spanning musical genius.