Griffith Law School Professor Bill MacNeil has been awarded the 2013 Penny Pether Prize for Scholarship in Law, Literature and the Humanities.
Bill is the Dean and Head of Griffith Law School and a highly respected law, literature and humanities scholar. His book Novel Judgements: Legal Theory as Fictionbeat out a competitive field of nominees to secure the award.
Bill’s award demonstrates his important contributions to the study of law, literature and the humanities. His book builds on his previous work in “reading jurisprudentially” to demonstrate why Victorian and modernist “legal imaginaries” continue to matter in our contemporary world. These texts pose questions about authority, legitimacy and the rule of law.
The prize honours the late Penny Pether (1957-2013), an Australian scholar whose passionate life-long commitment to the field pervaded every aspect of her teaching, research and academic work.
Penny helped convene the the first conference of the Law, Literature and Humanities Association of Australasia and founded the interdisciplinary journal Law, Text Culture.