Do you remember learning to swim? A lot of summer memories have been forged at the North Melbourne pool over the last century or so. Kerry Mullan is convenor of language studies at RMIT and an avid swimmer. Along with another punter, she is putting together a book aimed at capturing and celebrating those memories.…

Nancy Lane (@nancydeesculptures), a “2nd career” artist living in North Melbourne and working at River Studios in West Melbourne, has a unique practice of repurposing fragments from the streets of N&W Melbourne into assemblages resembling urban and natural landscapes. Community noticeboard: NWM Neighbourhood Centre’s end of year party and "Live at …

Ed Zhao is a local musician, artist and economist. During the pandemic, he fell in love with music from the Silk Road region of Central Asia. Ed learned to play oud and the music helped him and his family escape the lockdown. Also, in the return of the community noticeboard, artists and friends of the show Parul Sen and Nancy D Lane!…

Relive the thrills and spills of the 2023 Queensberry Cup billy cart race! I caught up with the winners and several other fearless competitors, aged 7 to 78. Congratulations to our Episode 2 guest, Ariel Valent, for organising a terrific event! Don't forget to subscribe, rate and review. And follow us on Facebook/Insta for all the updates.…

The Queensberry Cup is back – and it promises to be bigger, better and faster than ever! Cup organiser and North & West Melbourne Neighbourhood Centre director Ariel Valent gives us the inside scoop on what to expect at the annual billycart race and street festival. PLUS check out what’s on in our community noticeboard section. Produced & hosted by…

For our first episode we spoke to visual artist Parul Sen about finding inspiration in a new land and her iconic portraits of Melbourne cafes. The images we discussed are on our social media: www.linktr.ee/market2melrose Parul: www.instagram.com/pinkwattleart/ Sarah Allen: www.instagram.com/sarahallenillustration/ Market to Melrose is a podcast by …

It's official, and it's one more amazing step into the future at Life of the Law: we have a new Executive Director. Six years after Nancy Mullane, Tom Hilbink and Shannon Heffernan launched the first episode of Life of the Law, with stories about jury nullification and jailhouse lawyers, we welcome a new fearless leader. Tony Gannon, whom you have …

When things go bad all you need to do is pick up the phone and CALL. Since the US Supreme Court allowed lawyers to advertise in the 1970s, practices like these have skyrocketed, with often shoddily-produced results. Are tacky lawyer ads trashing the profession or simply making it more easily accessible to those who might not otherwise know who to c…

Where does one find a discussion of research on abduction for forced marriage amidst West and Central African conflicts? Where does one find research on how ‘yes means yes’ policies on university campuses have affected the college students intended to follow these new rules of consent? What about a conversation on the various strains of conservativ…

Immigration law is a mystery. Unless you’re an immigrant seeking relief under the law, or you’re an immigration law attorney, it’s an unknown. Then, earlier this year, Karla McKanders, a professor of immigration law at Vanderbilt Law School sent us an email. Her law students were producing their final reports on immigration and refugee law as audio…

How curious are you about your genetic makeup? There are hundreds of companies that provide direct-to-consumer tests that promise your genealogy, deep ancestry and biogeographical ancestry. Other tests offer genetic information about your health and traits, with some promising your whole genome sequencing. But when you get the results, do you reall…

Some two decades ago, filmmaker Andrew Nicols wrote and directed GATTACA a sci-fi movie that presented a future in which individuals and society were at risk from having gained access to, and control of, our genetic code. Today, 20 years after the movie's initial release, that future fiction, once considered distant and impossible, is, in many ways…

Mothers, brothers, sons and daughters in cities across the country are suffering from the loss of a loved one to police use of fatal force. In 2017 The Washington Post reports police officers in the United States shot and killed 987 people. Sixty eight of them, men and women, some of them teenagers like Tony Robinson, were unarmed when they were sh…

Police officers throughout the U.S. shoot and kill unarmed people, in Sacramento, Detroit, New Orleans and in Madison. The Washington Post reports 987 people were shot and killed by police in 2017, sixty-eight of them were unarmed. There are marches and calls for investigations and in the end, justice is elusive. So when Life of the Law producer Zo…

This week Life of the Law presents LIVE LAW... stories from people living with the rapid fire shifts that come with tech in the Bay Area, folks who are pushing back against the gentrification and alienation to try to make real life contact through music, journalism, murals, and filmmaking. LIVE LAW San Francisco: Initial Public Offering took place …

What would men in prison say, if we just listened? This week, Life of the Law presents a new INSIDE SAN QUENTIN episode - conversations inside San Quentin produced exclusively by men incarcerated inside the prison. We have laptops and can watch just about any movie or series anytime we want. Prisoners have access to some tv and select movies approv…

Over the past month, Life of the Law's team of journalists and scholars have published a three part series of feature investigative reports on Uganda, examining the long-term impact of the violence committed on the people of the East African nation by rebels with the Lord's Resistance Army or LRA. Beginning in the mid-1980's and for more than a dec…

For more than 20 years, rebels with the Lord's Resistance Army abducted 60,000 people from towns and villages in Northern Uganda, many of them young girls and boys who were then forced to fight, kill, and loot. Young girls spent years in captive marriages, forced to bear the children of LRA commanders. Where were the local police and government tro…

For more than 20 years, rebels with the Lords Resistance Army abducted 60,000 people, from towns and villages in Northern Uganda, many of them young girls and boys who were forced to fight, kill, loot and have sex with rebel commanders. Why didn't the government stop the abductions and the violence? Where was the international community? Who was up…

Today man named Dominic Ongwen is on trial before the International Criminal Court in the Hague, Netherlands. The 42 year old Ugandan is charged with committing war crimes and crimes against humanity in Northern Uganda. Ongwen is the only commander with the rebel group, The Lord’s Resistance Army, who is on trial before the ICC, but he wasn’t alone…

On Saturday night, Dec 5, 2015 more than 200 people filled the pews of the Catholic chapel inside San Quentin State Prison for a first-ever uncensored storytelling event behind the prison walls. Together, inmates and volunteers, officers and staff gathered to hear stories about the all-too-secret, often misunderstood community that sustains each of…

Traditions. We all have them. Some good and, well, some not so good. Think for a minute. When you were a kid, what were your holiday traditions? Do you still follow some of them today? Put up lights? Bake special cookies or visit relatives? What if the law makes it impossible to follow your traditions? More than two million Americans will spend the…

The polls got it wrong. What matters in the end, on election day, is who has the right to vote and who goes to the polls to cast their ballot. Due to strict voter ID laws, not all Americans are allowed to vote on election day. In fact, some 21 million are prevented from voting simply because they don't have the required ID or paperwork when they go…

2017 has been a terrible year for tens of thousands of people. Fires in northern California and record-setting torrential hurricanes and floods in Texas and Puerto Rico have meant that families have lost their homes and in many cases all of their belongings, including documentation and identification -- Social Security cards, drivers licenses and b…

"As incompetent and bumbling as the Trump Administration has been in so many areas, they have been brutally ruthless on immigration." -- Jose Chito Vela, Immigration Attorney and Candidate for Texas State Legislature It’s been a year since the Presidential election of 2016 and the night the world turned upside down and inside out. Polls showed Demo…

Nearly two years ago on January 26, 2016, Life of the Law presented Un-DACA-mented, a report on the Obama Administration's DACA Program, or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. The program, begun in 2012 offered undocumented immigrants who came to the US as children, a chance to defer deportation. Life of the Law producer Jonathan Hirsch travele…

Look around. Change is happening. People you know and people you pass on the street are in transition. They are transforming their lives. Unless you stop to hear their story, you may miss it. Each year new and former Soros Justice Fellows gather for four days of discussions, workshops, plenaries, breakout sessions, and meals to debate and discuss i…

All over the world people create. Music, art, literature. But is their creative work protected? Sure there are international copyright laws, but are they enforced? And if not, what then? This week our team took to the studio for a discussion to sort out global culture and international copyright law. If you haven't yet listened to our most recent f…