Associate Professor Tim Peters is a critical and cultural legal scholar based in the School of Law and Society. His research interests operate at the intersections between legal theory, theology and culture.
One trajectory of his work contributes to the field of cultural legal studies, examining the way law is constituted in cultural texts and artefacts as much as legal institutions. He has published a range of articles and book chapters on law in speculative fiction film and comics, including the recent monograph from Edinburgh University Press, A Theological Jurisprudence of Popular Cinema: Superheros, Science Fictions and Fantasies of Modern Law. In addition, he has co-edited (w Karen Crawley) Envisioning Legality: Law, Culture, Representation (2018, Routledge) and the forthcoming (w Karen Crawley and Thomas Giddens) Routledge Handbook of Cultural Legal Studies.
The second trajectory of his work draws upon political and economic theologies to critically re-examine the nature of corporate personhood and the vicariousness of corporate power from the medieval church through to contemporary instantiations of the corporation and new forms of corporate technology (such as artificial intelligence and decentralised autonomous organisations).
Associate Professor Peters was awarded a 2020 Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award for the project 'New Approaches to Corporate Legality: Beyond Neoliberal Governance'. This project seeks to critically rethink and reconceptualise legal approaches to the corporation. In particular, it critically analyses the constitutive vicariousness of corporate power through ideas of office, authority and aesthetics, dealing with questions related to corporate taxation, corporate sovereignty and corporate technology.
His professional background is in banking and finance and he has taught cultural legal studies, corporations law, associations law, securities regulation and corporate takeovers and competition and consumer law.
Associate Professor Peters is currently the president of the Law, Literature and the Humanities Association of Australia and a management committee member of the Society of Corporate Law Academics. He sits on Editorial Boards for a number of law and humanities and critical legal journals and book series.
He has experience supervising honours and PhD students in corporate law, banking & finance law, cultural legal studies, legal theory, regulation, law and theology.
Professional memberships
- President, Law, Literature and the Humanities Association of Australasia
- Management Committee member, Society of Corporate Law Academics
- Adjunct Research Fellow, Law Futures Centre (Griffith Law School, Griffith University)
- Academic Editor, Griffith Law Review: Law Theory Society
- Editorial Board, "Law and Visual Jurisprudence" Book Series, Springer
- Editorial Board, "TechnNomos: Law, Technology and Culture" Book Series, Routledge
- Member, Law and Society Association of Australia and New Zealand
- Member, Asian Law and Society Association
Awards and Fellowships
- 2020-2023 ARC DECRA Fellowship
Research grants
| Project name | Investigators | Funding body | Year | Focus |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Australian Research Council DECRA Fellowship | Associate Professor Timothy Peters | ARC - $420,040 | 2020 - 2023 | "New Approaches to Corporate Legality: Beyond Neoliberal Governance" |
Research areas
- Cultural legal studies
- Law and film
- Law and the visual
- Political and economic theology
- Corporate law
- Corporate theory
- Legal personhood
Teaching areas
- Cultural Legal Studies
- Corporations Law
- Competition and Consumer Law
- Legal Theory
Key recent research publications
- Jade-Ann Reeves and Timothy D Peters (2022) ‘Responding to Anthropocentrism with Anthropocentrism: The Biopolitics of Environmental Personhood’ 30(3) Griffith Law Review 474
- Timothy D Peters (2022) “The Theological-Bureaucratic Science Fiction of Philip K Dick and Carl Schmitt” in Kieran Tranter and Edwin Bikundo Carl Schmitt and the Buribunks: Technology, Law, Literature, Routledge.
- Timothy D Peters (2022) A Theological Jurisprudence of Speculative Cinema: Superheroes, Science Fictions and Fantasies of Modern Law, Edinburgh University Press
- Timothy D Peters (2020) “Daredevil as Legal Emblem” 2(2) Law, Technology and Humans, 198
- Timothy D Peters (2018) “Corporations, Sovereignty and the Religion of Neoliberalism” 29 Law and Critique 271
- Timothy D Peters (2018) “ ‘Holy trans-jurisdictional representations of justice, Batman!’: Globalisation, Persona and Mask in Kuwata’s Batmanga and Morrison’s Batman Incorporated” in Ashley Pearson, Thomas Giddens and Kieran Tranter (eds) Law and Justice in Japanese Popular Culture: From Crime Fighting Robots to Duelling Pocket Monsters, Routledge
- Timothy D Peters (2017) “I, Corpenstein: Mythic, Metaphorical and Visual Renderings of the Corporate Form in Comics and Film” 30(3) International Journal for the Semiotics of Law427
Tim's research is interdisciplinary and has two major focuses. The first examines the intersections of legal theory, theology and popular culture and his second research focus is on critical theories and genealogies of the corporation from the perspective of political and economic theology.