Sean Mulcahy
Biographic Data
| ID | 257954 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Sean Mulcahy |
| GIVEN NAMES | Sean |
| FAMILY NAME | Mulcahy |
| SIGNATURE | MULCAHY S |
| AFFILIATIONS | La Trobe University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9200-054X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 39 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 22 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 39 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2017 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Asserting human rights in the debate on drug-use stigma
Stigma is increasingly recognized as a key contributor to poorer mental and physical health and wellbeing of people who use drugs and a barrier to accessing health services (Wogen and Restrepo 2020
Dance/Law
Law and the lavatory
In the current political environment, there is a heightened debate around gender identity and the law. This article provides a reflective approach to exploring legal regulation of gender identity in relation to public bathrooms, with particular attention to access issues for trans and gender diverse people, building on earlier scholarship and recent public debates. Reflecting on these debates, the author draws from their personal experience to ex…
Performing the ‘Ladies Lounge’
In this article, we rethink, using theatrical jurisprudence and the field of law and performance, the logics deployed in the case of Lau v Moorilla Estate, and on appeal, Moorilla Estate v Lau. The case was instigated by Mr Jason Lau when he was denied access to the ‘Ladies Lounge’, a participatory installation at Tasmania’s Museum of Old and New Art where the process of being admitted or refused admission was part of the art itself. On appeal, t…
Performing Hepatitis C, Problematising “Cure”
Direct-acting antiviral (DAA) treatment for the blood-borne virus hepatitis C has shifted conceptions of the disease from a chronic infection – and, in some legal contexts, a “disability” – towards a non-permanent impairment capable of “cure”. The shift in treatment has also led to a shift in law. This paper explores the shift in Australian social security and migration judgments by drawing from performance studies research on disability and reco…
Is drug-use stigma a breach of human rights law
Whilst international drug policy increasingly recognises the need to address drug-use stigma, there is limited consideration of how drug-use stigma can be addressed through legal frameworks. This commentary considers the relationship between drug-use stigma and human rights law that prohibits torture and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment. In doing so, this commentary examines a landmark Australian coronial case that raised the possibility th…
Labour Unions and Human Rights in Australia
The labour movement and the human rights movement have long converged, with labour unions having become a significant actor in Australian human rights scrutiny processes and able to influence legislation concerning marginalized populations. In this paper, we explore the influence of Australian labour unions on human rights in relation to two population groups—people who use drugs and LGBTIQA+ people. This is based on a detailed examination of lab…
Troubling Drug Law, Political Participation and Human Rights
In recent years, enthusiasm for the role of human rights in shaping global drug policy has grown. Many argue that human rights can guide urgently needed drug policy reforms and instigate less punitive approaches to people who use drugs. To progress human rights-based reforms, international experts have issued guidance on what rights-compliant drug law and policy would look like. This way of thinking about both human rights and law emphasizes law …
Are We Human Or are We Dancer
Are We Human Or are We Dancer?: Sex, Drugs, and Bodies of Law
Searching for Performance in the Legal Archive
As researchers of the ‘legal performance’ of parliamentary human rights scrutiny, we often confront the overwhelmingly textual legal archive and find absences and gaps in the way that processes are documented. These textual records are but remnants of the legal performance or what Molderings might term ‘a fragmentary, petrified vestige of a lively process that took place at a different time in a different place.’ In this article, we deploy this i…
‘The tribunes of the people, the tongues o’ the common mouth’
Shakespeare’s First Folio included publication of Coriolanus, a play that is said to be inflected by political events at the time of its writing and still so by its publication during a period the English parliament was in abeyance, having been dissolved the year before. In this paper, we take up Raffield and Watt’s (2008) invitation to consider the relationship between Shakespeare’s work and the nation-state, by considering the relationship betw…
Conjuring the Ghosts
The notion that ‘drugs kill’ has been mobilised throughout history to restrict the human rights of people who use, possess and supply drugs and to subject them to criminal penalty as part of a global war on drugs. Death figures in and through the war on drugs in multiple ways, including through the current so-called ‘overdose crisis’, through extra-judicial killings by some states, and through use of the death penalty. What influence do these var…
Making kin with more-than-human rights
Globally, calls for drug law reform are growing. Importantly, many argue that reforms should be guided by human rights. These calls, while welcome, assume a shared understanding of and approach to human rights, and that human rights can effectively guide less punitive approaches to drugs. Such assumptions fail to recognise important critiques, including that human rights have not always protected the interests of those who fail to fit normative i…
The Victorian and Australian Capital Territory human rights charters and the absence of a right to health
Queensland has recently introduced a right to health services, but Victoria and the Australian Capital Territory—the two other Australian jurisdictions with a charter of rights—do not include such a right in their charters. This paper explores whether these jurisdictions should consider introducing a right to health and examines concerns around the potential scope and application of such a right, based on an analysis of reviews of the charters in…
Prima Facie (Original Theatre Soundtrack)
Mournful Mothers and Damaged Damsels
Scrutiny regimes in some Australian parliaments require consideration of human rights impacts of proposed legislation, but routinely ignore gendered impacts of legislation, particularly those relating to alcohol and other drugs. Where women's voices are heard, they are often only listened to according to stereotypes. Drawing on Anne Summers’ work on stereotypes of Australian women, an analysis of reports and hearing transcripts from major parliam…
We've got a present for you
With the advent of highly effective and tolerable direct-acting antiviral treatments for hepatitis C, widespread optimism for and investment in the project of disease elimination now informs the public health response. In Australia, the Commonwealth government has invested heavily in elimination by universally subsidising treatment, promising access for all. Reflecting concerns that commonly accompany ambitious public health projects, cost for go…
Troubling complaint
The need to grapple with hepatitis C-related stigma and discrimination in Australian health-care settings has been recognised in public policy, and work is underway to address it. But how likely are people to raise a complaint when they experience stigma or discrimination? And how effective and accessible are complaints mechanisms? Given complaint procedures are considered important parts of the delivery of safe and ethical health care, these are…
Making and Breaking ‘Bad’ Habits in Drugs, Law and Human Rights Scrutiny
Certain Australian parliaments have a process of human rights scrutiny, whereby a committee examines whether proposed laws are compatible with human rights. These processes are often driven by rituals or habitual ways of performing scrutiny that privilege reliance on legal advice over community input. Scholars have called for comparative work that helps us better understand whether habit plays a significant role in human rights scrutiny processes…
Law, drugs and the politics of childhood
"Law, drugs and the politics of childhood: from protection to punishment." Drugs: Education, Prevention and Policy, ahead-of-print(ahead-of-print), pp. 1–2
Hepatitis C data justice
The World Health Organization’s goal of achieving hepatitis C elimination by 2030 is inspiring the use of novel methods to find, diagnose and treat people living with the virus. Globally, rates of hepatitis C treatment uptake have declined. Data-driven public health approaches, including case finding, notification and contact tracing, are being developed and implemented to reach the elimination goal. Drawing on interviews with policymakers, lawye…
I’m not hep C free’
Since the advent of more effective, new-generation treatment for hepatitis C, immense resources have been devoted to delivering cure to as many people with the virus as possible. The scale-up of treatment aims to prevent liver disease, liver cancer and onward transmission of hepatitis C, but social research shows that people also approach treatment with its social promises in mind, including the hope that it might reduce or eradicate stigma from …
Forging new habits
Global drug policy is currently dominated by great enthusiasm about human rights, including the idea that rights can generate less punitive approaches to drugs. But if human rights were an effective framework for the prevention of punitive approaches towards drugs, why haven’t they prevented them previously? One possibility is that rights are less reliable for those society considers ‘less than human’. In Western liberal contexts that valorise vo…
A culture of rights finding its feet
In developing the Australian Capital Territory's Human Rights Act 2004 Human Rights Act. (2004). (ACT). [Google Scholar], the Bill of Rights Consultative Committee argued that ‘its primary purpose should be to encourage the development of a human rights-respecting culture’. But what does a ‘human rights-respecting culture’ look like? Commonly, a ‘culture of human rights’ is defined as a pattern of assumptions, shared and taught, that human rights…
A “Tick and Flick” Exercise
Human rights scrutiny processes in some Australian parliaments require consideration of whether rights-limiting legislation is reasonable, justifiable, and proportionate. The Queensland Human Rights commissioner has raised concerns of this becoming a “perfunctory ‘tick and flick’ exercise” in which decision-makers perform the “dance steps to [rights] derogation”—a concern emulated by others. Taking this notion of “tick and flick” and “dance steps…
Silence and Attunement in Legal Performance
Whilst the law maintains a right to silence, the sensorial and performative dimensions of that silence are seldom considered. This paper adopts an interdisciplinary approach, informed by legal theory and scholarship in the performing arts, such as theatre, performance studies, and music, as a way of understanding how silence plays in the court. The paper offers a typology to navigate the interpretation of silence in legal performance—both verbal …
Complicating cure
In recent years, highly tolerable and effective drugs have emerged promising a radical new 'post-hepatitis C' world. Optimism about medical cure potentially overlooks discrimination and stigma associated with hepatitis C and injecting drug use. Legal frameworks are especially relevant to hepatitis futures, since the law has the potential to reinforce or alleviate stigma and discrimination. This article explores how hepatitis C figures in Australi…
The trouble with normalisation
Modern health-care systems have customarily approached hepatitis C in ways that resemble the public health approach to HIV/AIDS known as 'HIV exceptionalism'. HIV exceptionalism describes the unusual emphasis on privacy, confidentiality and consent in approaches to HIV and was partly developed to address HIV/AIDS-related stigma. In the case of hepatitis C, exceptionalist approaches have included diagnosis and treatment by specialist physicians an…
Troubling complaint
The need to grapple with hepatitis C-related stigma and discrimination in Australian health-care settings has been recognised in public policy, and work is underway to address it. But how likely are people to raise a complaint when they experience stigma or discrimination? And how effective and accessible are complaints mechanisms? Given complaint procedures are considered important parts of the delivery of safe and ethical health care, these are…
Echoes and Antibodies
New drugs with the potential to cure hepatitis C have emerged. There is great optimism within medicine about the transformative potential of cure, but this overlooks the entrenched discrimination and stigma associated with both hepatitis C and injecting drug use and the role of law in re/producing it. Drawing on interviews with key stakeholders such as policymakers, lawyers, and representatives from peer organisations (N = 30), Latour’s (2013) wo…
Enacting Safety and Omitting Gender
Global momentum for drug law reform is building. But how might such reform be achieved? Many argue that human rights offer a possible normative framework for guiding such reform. There has been very little research on whether human rights processes can actually achieve such aims, however. This paper responds to this knowledge gap. It explores how one human rights mechanism—the “parliamentary rights scrutiny process”—deals with alcohol and other d…
We've got a present for you
With the advent of highly effective and tolerable direct-acting antiviral treatments for hepatitis C, widespread optimism for and investment in the project of disease elimination now informs the public health response. In Australia, the Commonwealth government has invested heavily in elimination by universally subsidising treatment, promising access for all. Reflecting concerns that commonly accompany ambitious public health projects, cost for go…
Forging new habits
Global drug policy is currently dominated by great enthusiasm about human rights, including the idea that rights can generate less punitive approaches to drugs. But if human rights were an effective framework for the prevention of punitive approaches towards drugs, why haven’t they prevented them previously? One possibility is that rights are less reliable for those society considers ‘less than human’. In Western liberal contexts that valorise vo…
On tables, doors and listening spaces
According to some scholars, it is essential that parliamentary human rights scrutiny processes allow for engagement with and scrutiny from civil society actors. There has, however, been limited examination of how parliamentary human rights scrutiny processes unfold in Australia. Where does the work of rights scrutiny take place, who has a seat at the table, and how, precisely, does scrutiny work unfold? In this paper, we explore these questions, …
Making Rights and Realities
Australia is unique among Western nations in that it does not have a national bill of rights; in lieu, rights protections have proceeded in a piecemeal fashion, with some jurisdictions developing their own systems for rights protection. These systems involve parliaments 'scrutinising' proposed new laws for their compatibility with rights. These processes are sometimes theorised as constitutive, capable of bringing various material-discursive effe…
Law & Culture
UK parliamentary inquiry turned verbatim musical
Silence and Attunement in Legal Performance
Whilst the law maintains a right to silence, the sensorial and performative dimensions of that silence are seldom considered. This paper adopts an interdisciplinary approach, informed by legal theory and scholarship in the performing arts, such as theatre, performance studies, and music, as a way of understanding how silence plays in the court. The paper offers a typology to navigate the interpretation of silence in legal performance—both verbal …
Singing the Law
What would the law sound like if it was sung? Whilst scholars have explored the relation between music and law, focus on the acoustic and musical dimensions of legal speech is relatively new. Exploring musical adaptations and remixes of legal transcripts, the paper argues that there is a latent musicality to legal speech. Using as case studies Opera Australia’s production of ‘Lindy’ and Donmar Warehouse’s production of ‘Committee’, where legal sp…
Dances with laws
Though law in/and/as performance is a burgeoning area of scholarship, with scholars exploring the relation between theatre, music and law, there is substantially less attention paid to the possibilities of dancing the law. In this article, the author identifies three styles of legal dance – (1) dance as legal practice, (2) dance as legal resolution, and (3) dance as legal research – providing case studies of each from amongst contemporary dance p…
Contents & Introduction, Law Text Culture, volume 25
This special issue of Law Text Culture, ‘Performing Theatrical Jurisprudence’, seeks to generate new accounts and explanations of law and legal thinking through the new field of theatrical jurisprudence. It invites a reflection on what theatrical jurisprudence can do for law and what law can do for performance
Methodologies of law as performance
Despite the growth in scholarship in the broad field of law as performance, there is little critical attention paid to methodologies of research. With attention to the growing research in this field, this paper shall consider methodological approaches to law as performance. This paper considers how traditional qualitative methodologies, such as ethnographic observations, case studies and comparative analysis, are used in law as performance studie…
Playing to the gallery
Roadside drug testing (‘RDT’) was introduced in the Australian Capital Territory (‘ACT’) through a private member’s Bill that was fiercely debated in the ACT parliament. It was the first RDT scheme in Australia subject to human rights scrutiny, and thus parliamentarians had to weigh road safety arguments against human rights considerations in determining whether the proposed measures were proportionate. This paper focuses on the debate over RDT i…
On tables, doors and listening spaces
According to some scholars, it is essential that parliamentary human rights scrutiny processes allow for engagement with and scrutiny from civil society actors. There has, however, been limited examination of how parliamentary human rights scrutiny processes unfold in Australia. Where does the work of rights scrutiny take place, who has a seat at the table, and how, precisely, does scrutiny work unfold? In this paper, we explore these questions, …
Echoes and Antibodies
New drugs with the potential to cure hepatitis C have emerged. There is great optimism within medicine about the transformative potential of cure, but this overlooks the entrenched discrimination and stigma associated with both hepatitis C and injecting drug use and the role of law in re/producing it. Drawing on interviews with key stakeholders such as policymakers, lawyers, and representatives from peer organisations (N = 30), Latour’s (2013) wo…
Enacting Safety and Omitting Gender
Global momentum for drug law reform is building. But how might such reform be achieved? Many argue that human rights offer a possible normative framework for guiding such reform. There has been very little research on whether human rights processes can actually achieve such aims, however. This paper responds to this knowledge gap. It explores how one human rights mechanism—the “parliamentary rights scrutiny process”—deals with alcohol and other d…
Making Rights and Realities
Australia is unique among Western nations in that it does not have a national bill of rights; in lieu, rights protections have proceeded in a piecemeal fashion, with some jurisdictions developing their own systems for rights protection. These systems involve parliaments 'scrutinising' proposed new laws for their compatibility with rights. These processes are sometimes theorised as constitutive, capable of bringing various material-discursive effe…
Making and Breaking ‘Bad’ Habits in Drugs, Law and Human Rights Scrutiny
Certain Australian parliaments have a process of human rights scrutiny, whereby a committee examines whether proposed laws are compatible with human rights. These processes are often driven by rituals or habitual ways of performing scrutiny that privilege reliance on legal advice over community input. Scholars have called for comparative work that helps us better understand whether habit plays a significant role in human rights scrutiny processes…
Law, drugs and the politics of childhood
"Law, drugs and the politics of childhood: from protection to punishment." Drugs: Education, Prevention and Policy, ahead-of-print(ahead-of-print), pp. 1–2
Hepatitis C data justice
The World Health Organization’s goal of achieving hepatitis C elimination by 2030 is inspiring the use of novel methods to find, diagnose and treat people living with the virus. Globally, rates of hepatitis C treatment uptake have declined. Data-driven public health approaches, including case finding, notification and contact tracing, are being developed and implemented to reach the elimination goal. Drawing on interviews with policymakers, lawye…
I’m not hep C free’
Since the advent of more effective, new-generation treatment for hepatitis C, immense resources have been devoted to delivering cure to as many people with the virus as possible. The scale-up of treatment aims to prevent liver disease, liver cancer and onward transmission of hepatitis C, but social research shows that people also approach treatment with its social promises in mind, including the hope that it might reduce or eradicate stigma from …
Forging new habits
Global drug policy is currently dominated by great enthusiasm about human rights, including the idea that rights can generate less punitive approaches to drugs. But if human rights were an effective framework for the prevention of punitive approaches towards drugs, why haven’t they prevented them previously? One possibility is that rights are less reliable for those society considers ‘less than human’. In Western liberal contexts that valorise vo…
A culture of rights finding its feet
In developing the Australian Capital Territory's Human Rights Act 2004 Human Rights Act. (2004). (ACT). [Google Scholar], the Bill of Rights Consultative Committee argued that ‘its primary purpose should be to encourage the development of a human rights-respecting culture’. But what does a ‘human rights-respecting culture’ look like? Commonly, a ‘culture of human rights’ is defined as a pattern of assumptions, shared and taught, that human rights…
A “Tick and Flick” Exercise
Human rights scrutiny processes in some Australian parliaments require consideration of whether rights-limiting legislation is reasonable, justifiable, and proportionate. The Queensland Human Rights commissioner has raised concerns of this becoming a “perfunctory ‘tick and flick’ exercise” in which decision-makers perform the “dance steps to [rights] derogation”—a concern emulated by others. Taking this notion of “tick and flick” and “dance steps…
The trouble with normalisation
Modern health-care systems have customarily approached hepatitis C in ways that resemble the public health approach to HIV/AIDS known as 'HIV exceptionalism'. HIV exceptionalism describes the unusual emphasis on privacy, confidentiality and consent in approaches to HIV and was partly developed to address HIV/AIDS-related stigma. In the case of hepatitis C, exceptionalist approaches have included diagnosis and treatment by specialist physicians an…
Complicating cure
In recent years, highly tolerable and effective drugs have emerged promising a radical new 'post-hepatitis C' world. Optimism about medical cure potentially overlooks discrimination and stigma associated with hepatitis C and injecting drug use. Legal frameworks are especially relevant to hepatitis futures, since the law has the potential to reinforce or alleviate stigma and discrimination. This article explores how hepatitis C figures in Australi…
Searching for Performance in the Legal Archive
As researchers of the ‘legal performance’ of parliamentary human rights scrutiny, we often confront the overwhelmingly textual legal archive and find absences and gaps in the way that processes are documented. These textual records are but remnants of the legal performance or what Molderings might term ‘a fragmentary, petrified vestige of a lively process that took place at a different time in a different place.’ In this article, we deploy this i…
‘The tribunes of the people, the tongues o’ the common mouth’
Shakespeare’s First Folio included publication of Coriolanus, a play that is said to be inflected by political events at the time of its writing and still so by its publication during a period the English parliament was in abeyance, having been dissolved the year before. In this paper, we take up Raffield and Watt’s (2008) invitation to consider the relationship between Shakespeare’s work and the nation-state, by considering the relationship betw…
Conjuring the Ghosts
The notion that ‘drugs kill’ has been mobilised throughout history to restrict the human rights of people who use, possess and supply drugs and to subject them to criminal penalty as part of a global war on drugs. Death figures in and through the war on drugs in multiple ways, including through the current so-called ‘overdose crisis’, through extra-judicial killings by some states, and through use of the death penalty. What influence do these var…
Making kin with more-than-human rights
Globally, calls for drug law reform are growing. Importantly, many argue that reforms should be guided by human rights. These calls, while welcome, assume a shared understanding of and approach to human rights, and that human rights can effectively guide less punitive approaches to drugs. Such assumptions fail to recognise important critiques, including that human rights have not always protected the interests of those who fail to fit normative i…
Political science (31 works) · Law (30 works) · Sociology (24 works) · Human rights (17 works) · Law (15 works) · Medicine (11 works) · HIV, Drug Use, Sexual Risk (10 works) · Scrutiny (10 works) · Law in Society and Culture (9 works) · Law and economics (8 works)