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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 legal theorist whose work challenges the dominant legal-positivist position in Anglo-American legal theory. His PhD was awarded the European Award for Legal Theory and published as Agency, Morality and Law in 2023. This prize recognises an ‘excellent contribution to jurisprudence,’ and an international jury acknowledged my work as ‘elegant and sophisticated;’ a ‘remarkable intellectual effort;’ and an ‘original contribution’ to the field. The monograph was also shortlisted for the 2023 Peter Birks Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship.


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 the method he defended in his first monograph, and he is currently in receipt of a Leverhulme Research Fellowship to develop an ethics-led approach to legal personality. This novel approach builds on his British Academy funded visit to Germany in 2026, during which he explored German language approaches to legal personality, and his time spent as a visiting researcher at the Max Planck Centre for Comparative Public and International Law in Heidelberg, the Cambridge Centre for Animal Rights Law and the Library of Congress in Washington DC.


Beyond Newcastle, Josh 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. He was also a member of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics' working group on neural organoids.


Areas of expertise:

  • Normative jurisprudence
  • Animal rights
  • Moral and legal personhood


Research

Josh's research challenges the dominant, legal positivist position in Anglo-American analytic legal theory: that moral and legal reasoning are distinct normative fields. His PhD was awarded the European Award for Legal Theory and published as Agency, Morality and Law in 2023. This prize recognises an ‘excellent contribution to jurisprudence,’ and an international jury acknowledged the work as ‘elegant and sophisticated;’ a ‘remarkable intellectual effort;’ and an ‘original contribution’ to the field. Post-publication reviews confirm the impact this work is having on the field, with the American Journal of Jurisprudence describing it as ‘methodologically rich in placing in explicit connection questions in meta-ethics, moral philosophy and general jurisprudence;’ and Jurisprudence identifying a ‘well argued, compelling’ effort to draw our attention to ‘a much-neglected tradition in legal theory.’ It was shortlisted for the 2023 Peter Birks Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship by the Society of Legal Scholars, and was the subject of a book symposium at the Edinburgh Legal Theory Festival in 2024.

 

Josh has expanded the method defended in that monograph by applying it to real world problems raised by legal personality – the mechanism by which the law identifies a being/entity as capable of bearing legal rights. He is currently on a Leverhulme Research Fellowship in which he will develop an ethics-led approach to legal personality - arguing that the law must acknowledge and accommodate moral reasons in order to ‘get it right.’ This work builds on his British Academy funded visit to Germany in 2026, during which he explored German language approaches to legal personality, and funded visiting research positions at the Max Planck Centre for Comparative Public and International Law in Heidelberg; the Cambridge Centre for Animal Rights Law; and (through the AHRC) the Library of Congress in Washington DC. This will result in a second monograph Legal personality: a constitutivist approach - currently under contract with Hart.


His work on legal personality has also been welcomed in both policy and practice. Josh was a member of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics' working group ethical and governance considerations with regards to neural organoids, whose report on this emerging medical technology was published in May 2026. He is also an Academic Fellow of the Middle Temple.


He also continues to work in general jurisprudence, with an interest in the secular natural law tradition. Alongside colleagues at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the University of Bristol he oversaw a project intended to bring analytic and critical legal theory into closer conversation, and an edited collection named Dialogues in Jurisprudence: Bridging the analytic-critical divide is expected to be published by Routledge in late 2026.

Teaching

Stage One:

  • LAW1230 - Law and Ethics

Stage Three:

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