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Staff Profile

Dr Joshua Jowitt

Senior Lecturer

  • Email: joshua.jowitt@ncl.ac.uk
  • Telephone: 0191 208 8797
  • Address: Newcastle Law School
    Newcastle upon Tyne
    NE2 4HE
Background

Josh is a Senior Lecturer in law, and has worked at Newcastle Law School since 2016. His present research interest is in the theoretical underpinning of legal rights for nonhuman entities, and the extent to which current scholarship in this field presupposes a legal positivist understanding of legal validity. This builds on his PhD research in contemporary natural law theory, which was recently awarded the European Award for Legal Theory and was published by Hart as ‘Agency, Morality and Law’  in 2023. The book was also shortlisted for the 2023 Peter Birks Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship.

His novel approach has led to visiting research positions at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law, Heidelberg; the Cambridge Centre for Animal Rights Law; and the Kluge Center at the Library of Congress, Washington DC. He also contributes to animal rights law courses as a visiting lecturer at institutions both within the UK and in Europe. He is a chair with Juris North; former co-convenor of the Jurisprudence subject stream in the Society of Legal Scholars; and an Academic Fellow of the Middle Temple.

Josh is also the Undergraduate Admissions Selector for the Law School, and takes an active role in widening participation and schools outreach activities undertaken both by the School and wider University.

Areas of expertise:

  • Normative jurisprudence
  • Animal rights
  • Moral and legal personhood


Research

Josh is a legal theorist whose research forms part of the contemporary secular natural law tradition. Specifically, he is interested in legal validity and Alan Gewirth's Principle of Generic Consistency (PGC), which – through a dialectically necessary argument – locates the existence of universally applicable moral norms in the concept of agency. His PhD thesis on this topic recently won the European Award for Legal theory, and was published as ‘Agency, Morality and Law’ by Hart in 2023. This monograph was also shortlisted for the 2023 Peter Birks Prize for outstanding legal scholarship by the Society of Legal Scholars.

His current research applies his theoretical starting point to the problem of how the interests nonhuman entities are protected in law. He has written about this on both the general level of legal personhood and the extent to which jurisdictions have discretion to recognise this status, and with regards to specific rights. Although the majority of his work has been done in relation to nonhuman animals and cerebral organoids, he is also interested in how these problems relate to AI.

Teaching

Stage One:

  • LAW1230 - Law and Ethics

Stage Three:

  • LAW3032 - Legal Theory
  • LAW3254 - Animal Rights Law
Publications