PhD, LLB (Hons), BA (Hons) (Melbourne)
Whakapātanga | Contact details
Email jan.mihal@otago.ac.nz
Whakaako | Teaching
Jan has also taught torts, human rights law, statutory interpretation, metaphysics, and narrative jurisprudence and myth as it relates to emerging technologies.
In 2022, he received an award recognising his excellence in teaching from James Cook University.
Rangahau | Research
Jan's research centres around deep questions about law's nature, foregrounding innovative ways of investigating and imagining lawfulness. He is co-author, along with eminent Indigenous poet and jurisprudent Dr C F Black, of Flowing with AI: Towards a New Jurisprudence (Cambridge University Press, 2026) which introduces a 'mythosophic' method for envisaging a lawful relationship with non-human superintelligence. It invites the reader to join in thinking and feeling through the links between law and iterative self-improvement, the cultivation of an internal moral compass, and the importance of what has come before.
Jan also actively researches in analytic philosophy of law and politics, where he draws upon multiple disciplines and schools of thought, exploring the intersection of jurisprudence, metaphysics, social ontology, social theory, moral and political thought, and the philosophy of biology. He is developing an original account of law's nature in 'etiological functionalist' terms, which is based on the patterns of feedback between law's effects, causes, and continued re-creation. Legal theory, even when concerned with questions of essence and necessity, should take into account empirical investigation around why people continue to rely upon, co-create, and participate in practices of law (of both state and non-state varieties). He is also theorising a general virtue jurisprudence, an account of political obligation which can apply to non-transparent 'black box' superintelligent systems, and how the ancient notion of qualified property may relate to emerging technology contexts such as virtual reality, blockchain, and online-game-item theft.
Takenga | Background
Jan has a PhD from Melbourne Law School and a Bachelor of Laws (Honours) and Bachelor of Arts (Honours) (majoring in Philosophy), also from the University of Melbourne. He has spent time as a visiting scholar at the Australian National University and has taught and undertaken research at the University of Melbourne, Monash University, and the University of California, Santa Cruz. In 2019-21, he was a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the National University of Singapore. In 2021-22, he was a Lecturer at James Cook University.
Publications
Mihal, J., Suaalii-Sauni, T., Gover, K., Young, S., & Hobbs, H. (2024, August). Laws and their others. Workshop presentation at the Otago Centre for Law and Society Conference: Pluralising Legalities, Dunedin, New Zealand. Conference Contribution - Verbal presentation and other Conference outputs
Mihal, J., & Black, C. F. (2023). Past the Promethean perspective: Protocols, permission, power. Law Literature and Humanities Association of Australasia Conference: Deus ex machina: Law, technology, humanities. (pp. 72). Retrieved from https://research.qut.edu.au/htlc/ Conference Contribution - Published proceedings: Abstract
Clover Alcolea, L., & Mihal, J. (2023, December). The tiptoe to crypto: An analysis and account of property rights in cryptocurrency [Invited]. Verbal presentation at the Private and Commercial Law Annual Conference, Perth, Australia. Conference Contribution - Verbal presentation and other Conference outputs
Mihal, J. (2023, July). (When) can we be wrong about what law is? Verbal presentation at the Australasian Society of Legal Philosophy (ASLP) Annual Conference, Auckland, New Zealand. Conference Contribution - Verbal presentation and other Conference outputs
Mihal, J. (2023, July). No-one is an island: A third person for a public, pluralist jurisprudence. Verbal presentation at the ICON·S Conference: Islands and Ocean: Public Law in a Plural World, Wellington, New Zealand. Conference Contribution - Verbal presentation and other Conference outputs