Kirsten Tranter
Biographic Data
| ID | 3459449 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Kirsten Tranter |
| GIVEN NAMES | Kirsten |
| FAMILY NAME | Tranter |
| SIGNATURE | TRANTER K |
| AFFILIATIONS | Queensland University of Technology |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1683-2939 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 36 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 6 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 36 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2001 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Welcome to the ‘Slop-verse’. AI and Writing about Law and Technology
This editorial is written by angry editors. We are angry because Big Tech has made available with large language models (LLMs) something that is killing a form of knowledge that we value. We are angry because rather than opening the academy to diverse voices and perspectives it is causing the exact opposite. We are angry because it highlights how generic academic writing had become to allow LLMs to imitate scholarly work. Ultimately, we are angry…
Introduction: Ordering of Human-Artificial Intelligent Constructs
The Ordering of Human-Artificial Intelligent (AI) Constructs symposium in Volume 8(2) of Law, Technology and Humans does one simple, yet entirely immodest, thing. It is trying to shift the frame of how law, humans and AI is being understood. This introduction argues that contemporary AI-law discourses rest upon particular imaginaries of order and legal ordering. It outlines these dominant imaginaries as well as why the framework-shifting work is …
Tensions in Law: Contestation and Interconnection
Benchmarks for Australian Law Researchers’ H-Index and Citation Count Bibliometrics
This article reports on Australian-based law researchers’ bibliometric measures, as recorded on Google Scholar in September 2024. It presents benchmark findings by academic position for H-index and raw citation count. In the context of the shift towards—and the need for—more nuanced and sophisticated research assessment measures, this article provides guidance to the Australian legal academy on Australian-specific data in relation to existing bib…
Roadside enforcement powers and automated vehicles in the European Union
This article reports on a study of the adaptability of European Union (EU) roadside enforcement powers to automated vehicles (AVs). It identifies technological obsolescence within EU laws where there are powers to stop vehicles being directed to the ‘driver’, ‘road users’ or ‘traffic participant’ all of which are assumed to be a ‘human’ controlling a vehicle. This is problematic in an automated transport future where automated driving systems (AD…
Fiat Lux/Fiat Lex: A Canticle for Leibowitz, Reason and Law
Walter M. Miller Jr’s A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959) is an enigmatic text. It is a depressing tale of the evitability of technoscientific civilization ending in apocalypse, a comedic story of ignorant monks producing gold-embellished illuminated copies of electronic circuit blueprints and an ambiguous examination of the tensions between faith and science. This paper reads A Canticle for Leibowitz as an examination of legality. Drawing inspiratio…
Sisyphus and the Present: Time in Modern and Digital Legalities
Albert Camus’ reflection in The Myth of Sisyphus presents the absurd, the intrusion of the meaningless and irrational universe into the order and future focus of modern life. Central to Camus’ reading of Sisyphus and his dammed eternal labour, was time. Camus clearly saw that modernity and modern life was predicated on tensions in time. Moderns perceived, and lived, in the timescale of past-present-future. A commitment to chronology that promised…
The Robot and Human Futures: Visualising Autonomy in Law and Science Fiction
This article argues that legal discourses about robots are framed within a limiting ‘human paradigm.’ While this is not a specific failure of lawyers, it has significant consequences for law in a digital future. This visualising of robots has its origins in mainstream twentieth-century science fictional tropes of artificial beings. This article begins by identifying the predominant science fiction tropes regarding artificial beings as a source of…
Dismissals for Social Media Hate Speech in South Africa: Animalistic Dehumanisation and the Circulation of Racist Words and Images
Social media is changing the way humans create and exchange information. Not all social media communications are, however, civil: the ‘dark side’ of social media cultivates various ‘anti-social’ exchanges including hate speech. Parallel accelerating social media use has been an increase in decision-makers having to consider the legalities of dismissing employees for social media misconduct. This paper through an analysis of first instance South A…
Jurisprudence of the Future
The future is in flux. There are many vectors of change, and none seem positive. Dark dystopian futures of war, climate catastrophe, polarising inequalities and digital disruption seem to be looming. This narrating of the future suggests the significance of science fiction. Science fiction acts as a storehouse for the imagining of the future. It also offers new approaches to justice and law. This symposium on ‘Jurisprudence of the Future’ contain…
Dislocated lives: The experience of women survivors of family and domestic violence after being ‘Hagued’
This article reports on interviews with ten women who had experienced the legal process of the 1980 Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction (the ‘Hague Convention’ or the ‘Convention’). We refer to that experience as being ‘Hagued’. All the women were subjected to a Hague return order after fleeing family and domestic violence perpetrated by their previous partner, because they fled with their children across internationa…
Penny Crofts and Honni van Rijswijk (2021) Technology. GlassHouse Book: Routledge
Kieran Tranter reviews Technology by Penny Crofts and Honni van Rijswijk
And then 'Friends'
This brief editorial focuses on the contribution in this volume titled ‘Machines Will Never Replace Humans!’ compiled by GPT-3. The brief text is provocative. It is provocative in demonstrating the potential efficiencies and complexities of machine-produced natural language text for ‘writing’ professions like law and the academy. It is further provocative as it reflects back the image and representation of the human within the digital. There is a…
The machine runs itself’: Law is technology and Australian embryo and human cloning law
Technology law scholarship has a tendency towards the dramatic. Technology causes disruption. Law must catch-up; it must ensure potential benefits from technology and avoid potential harms. There are even concerns that law, as an organiser of human life, is itself becoming eclipsed by forms of technological management. What is often not focused on is the practical process through which concerns about technology become transmuted into legal forms …
Symposium: What is Real about Law and Technology
This introduction orientates the seven articles that comprise the ‘What is Real about Law and Technology Symposium’. This symposium was inspired by Bruno Latour’s and Giorgio Agamben’s 2018 books that seemingly respond to the election of Donald Trump, by reconceptualising the relation between the real and representation. It is suggested that the irresolvability of Being (that humans can only experience the real through culture) should ground a mo…
Welcome to the Multiverse: Law, Technology and Humans
Law, Technology and Humans aims for something different from the mainstream of technology law scholarship. Rather than repeating analysis born from the dominant narrative, it boldly presents itself as a portal to the multiverse of stories and methods through which to understand, dream, critique, build and live well in the technological present as it, with every planetary rotation, moves towards the technological future
The Buribunks: Carl Schmitt on diaries, modernity and future
This special issue began life a decade ago when one of the authors was trying to complete a doctorate that linked (impossibly) legal theory, thinking about technology and science fiction together. In doing so John McCormack’s Carl Schmitt’s Critique of Liberalism:Against Politics as Technology1proved insightful in suggesting how Schmitt bridged legal and technological thought. This interest in Schmitt led to looking at Ellen Kennedy’s Constitutio…
Die Buribunken as science fiction: The self and informational existence
This paper takes Die Buribunken seriously as good science fiction. It is argued that it is good science fiction as it provides tropes, images and narratives through which the technological present and possible futures can be comprehended. Specifically, the Buribunks who confidently archive the self, present as a cypher for informational existence. Through learning about the Buribunks’ institutional organisation and deep motivations the various wa…
The Profession(s)' Engagements with LawTech: Narratives and Archetypes of Future Law
This article argues that there are three narratives to technology's role in augmenting, disrupting or ending the current legal services environment-each of which gives life to particular legal professional archetypes in how lawyers react to LawTech. In tracing these influential narratives and associated archetypes, we map the evolving role of LawTech, the legal profession and legal services delivery. The article concludes by proffering a further …
Travelling our way or no way: The collision of automobilities in Australian Northern Territory judicial narratives
The regulation of driving and cars has taken on increasingly criminal guises. Apart from the role of insurance companies and motor vehicle registries, criminal law has stepped in to penalise drivers and car owners through more draconian measures. This article examines the problems that this presents for Indigenous drivers whose concepts of automobility are at odds with those of the nation state. It details the judicial narratives of this collisio…
Disrupting Technology Disrupting Law
This Commentary disrupts technology disrupting law. It suggests that “disruption” is increasingly becoming a framework when lawyers write about technology. It is argued that this disruption frame is problematic. It is problematic because it reveals a surprising presentism lacking both a sense of the past and a coherent vision of the future. Further, this presentism produces an essential contradiction. There is a vision of hyper-change; a tsunami …
You gotta roll/rule with it’: Oasis and the concept of law
This article analyses HLA Hart's legal positivist theory through the life and music of the English band Oasis. It is argued that bringing Hart and Oasis into co-orbit reveals a fundamental ambiguity and anxiety within Hart's jurisprudential performance. It is argued that Oasis’ self-confidence compares to Hart's certainty of a distinction between law and morality and Oasis’ populism echoes Hart's claim of law as dependent on communal assent. Howe…
The Productivity Commission: A different engine for law reform
This empirical study analyses the extent to which the Productivity Commission (Commission) relies on different types of evidence in formulating recommendations in a sample of reports. It goes deeper than traditional citation analysis; rather than classifying and counting all material cited in each sample report, it includes only citations that influenced the final recommendations. The findings, which run counter to the rhetoric employed in relati…
Automobility and ‘My Family’ stickers
In this paper we explore the phenomena of ‘My Family’ stickers; the growing trend of stick-figure decals affixed to the rear window of motor vehicles. We suggest that the ‘My Family’ equipped vehicle generates excessive meanings about family, about road culture, about success and about forms of Australian belonging. It is argued that to represent ‘My Family’ on a motor vehicle is to stake a claim for belonging in a context where that belonging is…
Materiality and Memory: Motor Cars and Mobile Phones
Cornelia Vismann in Files suggests an intriguing hypothesis: the conditions for specific legalities are given essential form by the underlying materiality of information storage. The unique materiality of the scroll, the codex and the file made possible distinct legal forms: the magistrates of the Roman Republic, the universal code of empire and the biopolitical management of the nation-state. Vismann's insight was that the tactile way in which t…
The Profession(s)' Engagements with LawTech: Narratives and Archetypes of Future Law
This article argues that there are three narratives to technology's role in augmenting, disrupting or ending the current legal services environment-each of which gives life to particular legal professional archetypes in how lawyers react to LawTech. In tracing these influential narratives and associated archetypes, we map the evolving role of LawTech, the legal profession and legal services delivery. The article concludes by proffering a further …
Disrupting Technology Disrupting Law
This Commentary disrupts technology disrupting law. It suggests that “disruption” is increasingly becoming a framework when lawyers write about technology. It is argued that this disruption frame is problematic. It is problematic because it reveals a surprising presentism lacking both a sense of the past and a coherent vision of the future. Further, this presentism produces an essential contradiction. There is a vision of hyper-change; a tsunami …
Automobility and ‘My Family’ stickers
In this paper we explore the phenomena of ‘My Family’ stickers; the growing trend of stick-figure decals affixed to the rear window of motor vehicles. We suggest that the ‘My Family’ equipped vehicle generates excessive meanings about family, about road culture, about success and about forms of Australian belonging. It is argued that to represent ‘My Family’ on a motor vehicle is to stake a claim for belonging in a context where that belonging is…
Mad Max: The Car and Australian Governance
This article argues that the car is an intimate aspect of the governance of Australia. The term 'governance' is defined as the techniques used to know, order and manage individuals. The film Mad Max II: The Road Warrior is used as a prism to separate out the roles that the car performs in governance. Three roles are identified: the car as identity, the car as myth and the car as power. Applying this framework to Australia reveals the car's comple…
Terror in the Texts: Technology – Law – Future
Genes R Us Ethics and Truth in DNA
This article contends that at a fundamental level what is at stake in D matching is our humanity. This dimension of D testing renders it problematic and thus demands a more reflective consideration of its role in crime prevention. Although D profiling is 'here to stay' the authors discuss some basic misconceptions concerning the science and caution against the 'blind faith' placed on D profiling as the magic bullet for crime detection and prevent…
Genes R Us Ethics and Truth in DNA
This article contends that at a fundamental level what is at stake in D matching is our humanity. This dimension of D testing renders it problematic and thus demands a more reflective consideration of its role in crime prevention. Although D profiling is 'here to stay' the authors discuss some basic misconceptions concerning the science and caution against the 'blind faith' placed on D profiling as the magic bullet for crime detection and prevent…
Terror in the Texts: Technology – Law – Future
Mad Max: The Car and Australian Governance
This article argues that the car is an intimate aspect of the governance of Australia. The term 'governance' is defined as the techniques used to know, order and manage individuals. The film Mad Max II: The Road Warrior is used as a prism to separate out the roles that the car performs in governance. Three roles are identified: the car as identity, the car as myth and the car as power. Applying this framework to Australia reveals the car's comple…
The Different Side of Society: Street Practice and Australian Clinical Legal Education
There are three claims concerning clinical legal education (CLE) in the Australian literature. The first, associated with CLE's 1970s heritage, is the claim that CLE is about the study of injustice and the progressive practice of law. The second is that CLE is about skills training. The third is that CLE is about effecting personal value change in students through exposing them to the 'different side of society'. The recent documentary Street Pra…
Echo and Mirror: Clone Hysteria, Genetic Determinism and Star Trek Nemesis
This essay examines the hysteria that surrounded cloning and the law that this hysteria called forth in Australia in 2002. Through a parallel reading of two accounts of clones, the public record of cloning that ended with the Prohibition of Human Cloning Act 2002 (Cth), and Star Trek: Nemesis, it argues that instead of fearing the clone, it is clone hysteria that should be feared. Star Trek: Nemesis exposes the constitute anxieties (clone as doub…
After Pelka: Marriage-like Relationships under Social Security Law
This article argues that Re Pelka and Secretary, Department of Family and Community Services changes the interpretation of the marriage-like relationship rule in the Social Security Act 1991 (Cth) in two small, but important ways. It clarifies the financial elements of the rule and suggests an interpretation that would lead to more structured decision-making
Stories of Human Autonomy, Law, and Technology
Considering the relationship between human autonomy, law and technology has deep origins. Both technology studies and legal theory tell origin stories about human autonomy as the prize from either a foundational technological or jurisprudential event. In these narratives either law is considered a second order consequence of technology or technology is revealed as a second order consequence of law. In the alternative what is suggested is a founda…
The Speculative Jurisdiction: The Science Fictionality of Law and Technology
This article argues that scholarship on law and technology is a thoroughly speculative activity. The textual signifiers of this speculative orientation are the multiple incursions of science fiction that locate and justify lawyers writing about technology. Through a detailed examination of three law and technology literatures – on early space technology, IVF and virtual worlds – it will be shown that science fiction is the storehouse of images an…
The Laws of Technology and the Technology of Law
This article maps responses to the question of law and technology. While there is much literature that considers law and technology, deeper connections have been underappreciated. In particular, the general and historical dimension of the legal engagement with technology, the cultural and social mediations between law and technology, and the technology of law itself have been neglected. Through mapping where these connections have been made, the …
Come a Day there Won’t be Room for Naughty Men Like Us to Slip About at All’: The multi-media outlaws of Serenity and the possibilities of post-literate justice
If legal theory has only recently become aware of the pain and problems of law’s textual medium what is to be made of a culture where information exchange through reading and writing becomes displaced by the visual and physical acts of icon manipulation? How is justice to be achieved in a coming post-literate age of quasi-hieroglyphics; that is the emerging media of graphic user interfaces on touchscreens? In a ‘software-sorted society’ (Murakami…
An Interview with China Miéville
An Interview with China Miéville Kirsten Tranter (bio) and China Miéville Scholars entering the British Library in China Miéville's novel Kraken (2010) might be alarmed by the large number of black cats outside the building. They seem to be gathering-marching, perhaps-with intent, while clouds of sparrows circle overhead in spookily deliberate formations. These are not stray animals but rather a crowd of familiars, the animals who serve London's …
Materiality and Memory: Motor Cars and Mobile Phones
Cornelia Vismann in Files suggests an intriguing hypothesis: the conditions for specific legalities are given essential form by the underlying materiality of information storage. The unique materiality of the scroll, the codex and the file made possible distinct legal forms: the magistrates of the Roman Republic, the universal code of empire and the biopolitical management of the nation-state. Vismann's insight was that the tactile way in which t…
Automobility and ‘My Family’ stickers
In this paper we explore the phenomena of ‘My Family’ stickers; the growing trend of stick-figure decals affixed to the rear window of motor vehicles. We suggest that the ‘My Family’ equipped vehicle generates excessive meanings about family, about road culture, about success and about forms of Australian belonging. It is argued that to represent ‘My Family’ on a motor vehicle is to stake a claim for belonging in a context where that belonging is…
You gotta roll/rule with it’: Oasis and the concept of law
This article analyses HLA Hart's legal positivist theory through the life and music of the English band Oasis. It is argued that bringing Hart and Oasis into co-orbit reveals a fundamental ambiguity and anxiety within Hart's jurisprudential performance. It is argued that Oasis’ self-confidence compares to Hart's certainty of a distinction between law and morality and Oasis’ populism echoes Hart's claim of law as dependent on communal assent. Howe…
The Productivity Commission: A different engine for law reform
This empirical study analyses the extent to which the Productivity Commission (Commission) relies on different types of evidence in formulating recommendations in a sample of reports. It goes deeper than traditional citation analysis; rather than classifying and counting all material cited in each sample report, it includes only citations that influenced the final recommendations. The findings, which run counter to the rhetoric employed in relati…
Disrupting Technology Disrupting Law
This Commentary disrupts technology disrupting law. It suggests that “disruption” is increasingly becoming a framework when lawyers write about technology. It is argued that this disruption frame is problematic. It is problematic because it reveals a surprising presentism lacking both a sense of the past and a coherent vision of the future. Further, this presentism produces an essential contradiction. There is a vision of hyper-change; a tsunami …
Travelling our way or no way: The collision of automobilities in Australian Northern Territory judicial narratives
The regulation of driving and cars has taken on increasingly criminal guises. Apart from the role of insurance companies and motor vehicle registries, criminal law has stepped in to penalise drivers and car owners through more draconian measures. This article examines the problems that this presents for Indigenous drivers whose concepts of automobility are at odds with those of the nation state. It details the judicial narratives of this collisio…
Welcome to the Multiverse: Law, Technology and Humans
Law, Technology and Humans aims for something different from the mainstream of technology law scholarship. Rather than repeating analysis born from the dominant narrative, it boldly presents itself as a portal to the multiverse of stories and methods through which to understand, dream, critique, build and live well in the technological present as it, with every planetary rotation, moves towards the technological future
The Buribunks: Carl Schmitt on diaries, modernity and future
This special issue began life a decade ago when one of the authors was trying to complete a doctorate that linked (impossibly) legal theory, thinking about technology and science fiction together. In doing so John McCormack’s Carl Schmitt’s Critique of Liberalism:Against Politics as Technology1proved insightful in suggesting how Schmitt bridged legal and technological thought. This interest in Schmitt led to looking at Ellen Kennedy’s Constitutio…
Die Buribunken as science fiction: The self and informational existence
This paper takes Die Buribunken seriously as good science fiction. It is argued that it is good science fiction as it provides tropes, images and narratives through which the technological present and possible futures can be comprehended. Specifically, the Buribunks who confidently archive the self, present as a cypher for informational existence. Through learning about the Buribunks’ institutional organisation and deep motivations the various wa…
The Profession(s)' Engagements with LawTech: Narratives and Archetypes of Future Law
This article argues that there are three narratives to technology's role in augmenting, disrupting or ending the current legal services environment-each of which gives life to particular legal professional archetypes in how lawyers react to LawTech. In tracing these influential narratives and associated archetypes, we map the evolving role of LawTech, the legal profession and legal services delivery. The article concludes by proffering a further …
Symposium: What is Real about Law and Technology
This introduction orientates the seven articles that comprise the ‘What is Real about Law and Technology Symposium’. This symposium was inspired by Bruno Latour’s and Giorgio Agamben’s 2018 books that seemingly respond to the election of Donald Trump, by reconceptualising the relation between the real and representation. It is suggested that the irresolvability of Being (that humans can only experience the real through culture) should ground a mo…
Penny Crofts and Honni van Rijswijk (2021) Technology. GlassHouse Book: Routledge
Kieran Tranter reviews Technology by Penny Crofts and Honni van Rijswijk
And then 'Friends'
This brief editorial focuses on the contribution in this volume titled ‘Machines Will Never Replace Humans!’ compiled by GPT-3. The brief text is provocative. It is provocative in demonstrating the potential efficiencies and complexities of machine-produced natural language text for ‘writing’ professions like law and the academy. It is further provocative as it reflects back the image and representation of the human within the digital. There is a…
The machine runs itself’: Law is technology and Australian embryo and human cloning law
Technology law scholarship has a tendency towards the dramatic. Technology causes disruption. Law must catch-up; it must ensure potential benefits from technology and avoid potential harms. There are even concerns that law, as an organiser of human life, is itself becoming eclipsed by forms of technological management. What is often not focused on is the practical process through which concerns about technology become transmuted into legal forms …
Political science (28 works) · Law (25 works) · Sociology (22 works) · Law (16 works) · Law in Society and Culture (15 works) · Philosophy (14 works) · Epistemology (10 works) · Computer Science (8 works) · Philosophy (8 works) · Aesthetics (7 works)