Monash law PhD students made to critique thesis based on Marxist, feminist, critical race theory

Students and academics have criticised Monash University’s law PhD course, which forces students to critique their thesis based on Marxist, feminist and critical race and queer theory.

PhD students at Monash University are required to critique their law thesis based on feminist and queer theory.

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Students and academics have criticised Monash University’s PhD law course, which forces students to critique their thesis based on Marxist, feminist, critical race and queer theory, as one student claimed they were “expected” to include “critical law theory” in their black letter law thesis, and said the approach was “destroying legal academia”.

It comes as Macquarie University’s vice-chancellor ordered a review of its law school practices after students said their course had become hijacked by a political ideology that was damaging to their education, with revelations law students faced the threat of failing one part of an exam if they performed an ­under­whelming ­acknowledgment of country.

Monash PhD students are required to complete 120 hours of compulsory research skills training in part from “critical legal studies, international law and ­theory, feminism and philosophy”. The Australian understands Monash Law’s Critical Legal Studies looks at the relationship between law, power and politics.

Lecture slides, seen by The Australian, note CLS is “concerned with theory” that includes “Marxism, postmodernism/poststructuralism; feminism; queer theory; critical race theory; critical disability theory”. Students are told to “note the intersections between these groupings”.

At the end of the unit, The Australian believes, students are provided with a reflection task and asked to consider to what extent (if any) critical legal studies (or critical legal method) intersects with their research; and to reflect on the implications of these perspectives on thesis topics.

One student, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said in the process of completing CLS, “it was made quite clear to me that you were … almost expected to include something like this in your thesis, regardless of what the topic was.”

The student said compulsory critical legal studies was not included in the enrolment process but they were met with “surprise” when they told supervisors that “I won’t be critiquing the law on the basis of any of these theories in my thesis”.

“I was told by my supervisors that I needed to do this and there was this expectation that you needed to have all these theories … in your PhD. This is what would be expected by examiners. That was a great concern to me because why should this be in a PhD on … any black letter law topic?” they said. “And if this is expected by ­examiners, then are we just saying that this is what legal academia has become, and there’s actually no room for this legal research anymore.”

The student said this “expectation” would undermine rigorous legal analysis. While they believed other students “probably didn’t think it was appropriate … it was not a place where you could ask that sort of a question.”

On the back of the saga at Macquarie Law School, the student said “Victorian universities are … a whole step worse when it comes to this, in my experience”.

The student, having studied at other institutions, said they had never “seen such an obvious attempt to infiltrate all of academia with this ideology as I did at Mon­ash. My big concern with this happening at a PhD level is that it is destroying legal academia.

“And the academy plays a very, very important role in the broader legal system. And if, at the level of which are meant to be conducting rigorous research and adding to the body of legal academic work for the purpose of building the legal system or clarifying very important questions of law, we’re going to lose that entirely.”

A lecture slide for the CLS unit titled “Theoretical influences in brief: Marx” states that a central idea of CLS is that “law is embroiled in perpetrating the status quo that is unjust; that maintains inequalities, in which some are oppressed”.

Another “theoretical influence” is American gender studies scholar Judith Butler, and through this lens, students can look at “law as a type of … discursive practice in which we produce ‘who we are’, e.g. criminals, stereotypes of women in family law cases, etc”.

Sydney University Law Professor Emeritus Barbara McDonald said she would advise students to “get a different supervisor if that’s not the approach (they) wanted to take. If it’s part of a broader course on different approaches to research, then maybe you can’t object to that. But if you’re required to do a whole course on critical legal studies, well, quite frankly, I wouldn’t have enrolled there because I would’ve thought I won’t understand what they’re talking about most of the time. That’s probably a reflection on me.”

“There are many different ways of looking at aspects of law,” she said. “I always tell students there’s no one way to answer something. There are different ways. And you might have a high distinction answer taking one approach and another taking a different way … I don’t think they should be any straight jacket.”

A spokesperson for Monash University said: “Critical analyses of texts have been taught in law schools for many years and are part of basic doctoral training for PhD students to support their research theses.”