Skip to main content

Staff Profile

Dr Joshua Jowitt

Senior Lecturer

  • Telephone: 0191 208 8797
  • Address: Newcastle Law School
    Newcastle upon Tyne
    NE2 4HE
Background

Josh is a 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 beings, and the extent to which current scholarship in this field presupposes a legal positivist understanding of legal normativity. 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 him being invited to undertake visiting research positions at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law, Heidelberg, and the Cambridge Centre for Animal Rights Law, and to contribute as a visiting lecturer to animal rights law courses in both the UK and Europe. He is a chair with Juris North, and co-convenor of the Jurisprudence subject stream in the Society of Legal Scholars.

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 natural law tradition. Specifically, he is interested in how our view of legal normativity should be informed by 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.

He has recently begun applying this theoretical starting point to the problem of how the interests nonhuman beings 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 for specific types of nonhuman entity. Although the majority of his work has been done in relation to nonhuman animals, 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

PGT:

  • SML8001 - Law and Translation
Publications