Shane Chalmers joined the University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law as an Assistant Professor in 2023. He is a scholar of law and the humanities, with a critical focus on the legacies of European colonialism for laws and societies today. His work has contributed to the sub-fields of law and colonialism, law and development, and critical legal theory. He is also a long-standing member, and currently a Vice President, of the Law, Literature and Humanities Association of Australasia.

Shane is the author of Liberia and the Dialectic of Law: Critical Theory, Pluralism, and the Rule of Law (Routledge, 2018). The book, based on his doctoral thesis, examines the legal formation of Liberia, from its conception as an idea of liberty in the nineteenth century, through its establishment as a republic in the twentieth century, to its post-war reconstruction at the beginning of the twenty-first century with assistance of an international intervention to establish a state based on the rule of law. The book contributes a critical understanding of the role of law in the formation of Liberia, and the implications of the state’s historical formation for law and justice today, in Liberia and other international development contexts.

Shane is currently completing a second monograph, Colonial Legal Imaginaries: A Carnivalesque Jurisprudence of the Antipodes, which examines the legal imaginary that shaped and was shaped by the colonisation of Australia in the nineteenth century. The book shows how this imaginary worked to dispossess, dehumanise, and disempower First Nations through its forms of property, dignity, and sovereignty; and it aims to unsettle these legal forms, and open them up to reimagination. In doing so, it develops a new kind of jurisprudence – a carnivalesque jurisprudence – which uses the Bakhtinian figures of the clown, the fool, and the rogue to examine and represent the colonial legal imaginary, using an idiom of laughter that is critically potent as well as generative.

Since joining the University of Hong Kong, Shane’s research has begun to focus on how an imperial imaginary sustained the authority of law in British colonies in East and Southeast Asia, and how disruptions within this imaginary by local artists worked to disrupt the legal authority of the British colonists.

Shane is also editor (with Sundhya Pahuja) of The Routledge Handbook of International Law and the Humanities (Routledge, 2021); and he is currently editing a collection of essays (with Desmond Manderson) on Colonial Legal Imaginaries, Southern Literary Futures.