Associate Professor Marc De Leeuw

I am an Associate Professor at the 'Faculty of Law and Justice' working at the edges of law, on domains that, due to radical technological change or ruptures in our ethical imagination, require legal consideration in a philosophical register. The legal standing of collective ecological entities, the fashioning, use and ownership of human body parts, the legal status of non-human minds and agent-less creative processes; these are the frontiers of law across which I work, and though these are unstable and changing terrains, they necessarily feed back into classical questions of jurisprudence. 

At the law school I teach across a range of courses from ‘Legal Theory’, and ‘Theories of Justice’, to electives on ‘Law and Biology’, 'Food-Law' and, most recently, 'Transforming Environmental Law: Exploring Legal Rights of Nature' (with Alice Bleby).

Before coming to Australia, I was a Junior Visiting Fellow at the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University. In 2017 I resided as a Visiting Fellow with the Center for the Study of Law and Society at the University of California-Berkeley. During the academic year 2020/21 I was a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton) participating in the research program "Science and the State".

I served as UNSW Law's Ethics and Grievance Officer (2018-2020), currently chair the "Theory Section", am a member of the UNSW Allens Hub for Law, Technology and Innovation where I initiated and lead the research stream on "Hybrid Life and Legal Personhood" and participate in the UNSW Environmental Law Group. 

PhD, LLM or research thesis applications in legal theory & philosophy, socio-legal studies, biolegality, neurolaw, legal ecology (rights of nature, climate litigation), social study of law, technology and science, and the legal implications of 'cognitive assemblages' (AI/ Robotics) are all very welcome.