Professor Margaret Davies

After studying law and English literature at Adelaide University in the 1980s, Margaret completed a doctorate in critical legal theory at Sussex University. Margaret was a foundation staff member of the Law School at Flinders University and has been a visiting scholar at Birkbeck College, Umea University, UBC, and Victoria University of Wellington, and has held a Leverhulme Visiting Professorship at the University of Kent. She has been a recipient of four Australian Research Council grants, and is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia, the Australian Academy of Law, and an international Fellow of the British Academy. Margaret is author of six books - Asking the Law Question (Fifth Edition, 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). From 2010 to 2012 Margaret was a member of the Humanities and Creative Arts Panel of the ARC College of Experts, and chaired the panel in 2011. Margaret is on the advisory boards of Social and Legal Studies, Feminist Legal Studies, and the Macquarie Law Journal.

Margaret’s research is in legal theory, with a focus on critical legal theory, feminist legal theory, legal pluralism, the philosophy of property, and ecological jurisprudence. Margaret’s most recent books concern the many ways that law is embedded in social and ecological conditions. She has been particularly interested in developing an account of normativity that connects legal norms with social and ecological norms, enabling a view of law that is emergent from a dynamic natural world.