Twenty Minutes with The Devil is a thriller, a black comedy, and a contemporary fable covering topics such as harm reduction, global drug wars, social inequity, legal theory, corruption and violence. We invite you to be part of this special event. In what ways do the creative arts transform, transcend, or challenge our understanding of these issues? What does it mean not just to talk about ‘law and the humanities’, but to do it?

Desmond Manderson is jointly appointed in the College of Law and College of Arts & Social Sciences at The Australian National University. He directs the Centre for Law, Arts and the Humanities, designing innovative interdisciplinary courses with English, philosophy, art theory and history, political and critical theory, and beyond. He has authored several books including From Mr. Sin to Mr. Big (Oxford University Press 1993); Songs Without Music: Aesthetic Dimensions of Law and Justice (University of California Press 2000); Proximity, Levinas, and the Soul of Law (McGill-Queen’s University Press 2006); Kangaroo Courts and the Rule of Law: The Legacy of Modernism (Routledge 2012). His most recent monograph, Danse Macabre: Temporalities of Law in the Visual Arts (Cambridge University Press 2019) received the 2019 Penny Pether Prize for research in law and the humanities, and the 2020 Australian Legal Research Award for best book. His co-written play Twenty Minutes with the Devil (with Luis Gomez Romero) premiered at The Street Theatre, Canberra in 2022.  

Shane Chalmers is an Assistant Professor at the University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law, and Senior Lecturer at the University of Adelaide Law School. His research examines law from disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. It shares a critical concern with the legacies of European colonialism for laws and societies today, investigated through a combination of cultural analysis and historical enquiry. He is author of Liberia and the Dialectic of Law: Critical Theory, Pluralism, and the Rule of Law (Routledge 2018), editor (with Sundhya Pahuja) of The Routledge Handbook of International Law and the Humanities (Routledge 2021), and he is currently completing a monograph tentatively titled The Antipodes: A Carnivalesque Jurisprudence of a Colonial Imaginary.