Staff Profile

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

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.

Stage One:

• LAW1230 - Law and Ethics

Stage Three:

• LAW3032 - Legal Theory
• LAW3254 - Animal Rights Law

• Articles

  • Jowitt J. Tomorrow you shall cease to be a marionette, and you shall become an inventor. The Cambridge Law Journal 2024, 83(2), 226-229.
  • Jowitt J. On the legal status of human cerebral organoids: Lessons from animal law. Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 2023, 32(4), 572-581.
  • Pichl A, Ranisch R, Altinok O, Antonakaki M, Barnhart AJ, Bassil K, Boyd JL, Chinaia AA, Diner S, Gaillard M, Greely HT, Jowitt J, Kreitmair K, Lawrence D, Lee T, McKeown A, Sachdev V, Schicktanz S, Sugarman J, Trettenbach K, Wiese L, Wolff H, Árnason G. Ethical, legal and social aspects of human cerebral organoids and their governance in Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States. Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology 2023, 11, 1194706.
  • Jowitt J. Agency, morality and the legal status of human cerebral organoids’. Molecular Psychology: Brain, Behavior, and Society 2023, 2, 12.
  • Jowitt J. Assessing Contemporary Legislative Proposals for their compatibility with a natural law case for AI legal personhood. AI & Society 2021, 36, 499-508.
  • Jowitt J. Legal rights for animals: aspiration or logical necessity?. Journal of Human Rights and the Environment 2020, 173-198.
  • Jowitt J. The Desirability of Legal Rights for Novel Beings. Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 2019, 30(3), 504-516.
  • Tyrrell H, Jowitt J. Let them eat cases! Bridging the gap between school and degree level learning. The Law Teacher 2019, 56(2), 271-289.
  • Jowitt J. Monkey See, Monkey Sue? Gewirth's Principle of Generic Consistency and Rights for Non-Human Agents. Trinity College Law Review 2016, XIX, 71-96.

• Authored Book

  • Jowitt J. Agency, Morality and Law. Oxford: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2023.

• Book Chapters

  • Dunn R, Jowitt J. The Animal Sentience Committee: Evolution or revolution in the recognition of animal sentience in the UK?. In: Kotzmann J; Rodriguez Ferrere M, ed. The Legal Recognition of Animal Sentience: Principles, Approaches and Applications. Oxford: Hart, 2024, pp.207-224.
  • Jowitt J. La L3-37 Continue: Droid rights and the problem of legal personhood. In: Eberl JT; Decker KS, ed. Star Wars and Philosophy Strikes Back. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2023, pp.152-161.