About this Event
Please join us for a Public lecture by Professor Margaret Davies, Emeritus Professor of Law at Flinders University. This free public event is held in conjunction with the invitation-only workshop Liminal Legalities (24-25 November 2026).
The public lecture will be held in person. If you are unable to attend on campus, you are welcome to join online via Teams Link
The lecture will be followed by a Q&A session and refreshments. Please register by Monday, 23 November 2026 (close of business).
For further information, please contact: Marc de Leeuw ([email protected]) or Harry Hobbs ([email protected])
About the Speaker
Margaret Davies is an Emeritus Professor of Law at Flinders University, where she continues her research in legal theory, with particular interests in critical legal theory, feminist legal theory, legal pluralism, the philosophy of property, and ecological jurisprudence. Her recent work explores the ways in which law is embedded within social and ecological conditions. She has been especially interested in developing an account of normativity that connects legal norms with social and ecological norms, enabling a view of law as emergent from a dynamic natural world. Professor Davies is the author of six books, including Asking the Law Question (5th ed, 2023), Delimiting the Law (1996), Are Persons Property? (with Ngaire Naffine, 2001), Property: Meanings, Histories, Theories (2007), Law Unlimited (2017, winner of the SLSA Theory and History Book Prize), and EcoLaw (2022).
Abstract: Ontonomy and Liminality
Understood as an imposed set of contingent limits, (Western, colonial) law produces multiple insides and outsides, subjects and objects. Because such law is said to emerge from social, human, and textual practices, its purported limits are in fact always liminal spaces. Bringing the material and ecological substrata of any human-defined law into view amplifies the complexity of liminal legalities, with every action, situation, place, and being composed of plural normativities, limits, and thresholds. In this talk, I explore the idea of ontonomy in relation to liminality. Autonomy is self-regulation and control of one's own limits (as subject or sovereign), while heteronomy is regulation by an external force (as object or client state with compromised limits). Yet the vast majority of norms are neither chosen by the self nor imposed by another. Ontonomy is the ongoing and highly mobile co-emergence of norms with existence. The term captures an ontological web of norms from which entities emerge as objects and subjects, and from which limits, such as those defining "law", coalesce through intensified, compressed, and historically embedded normative practices. Ontonomy may help explain both the ubiquity of liminal spaces and what occurs within them, as new formations and contestations test, regenerate, and sometimes decompose conventional legalities.
Organisers: Marc de Leeuw (UNSW), Harry Hobbs (UNSW), and Steven Young (University of Otago).
Event venue & nearby stays
UNSW Law Adrian Cameron Room, Level 2, UNSW Law, Sydney, Australia
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