Hopeful Legal Futures at the SAANZ Conference in Aotearoa
The Sociological Association of Aotearoa New Zealand (SAANZ) holds an annual conference in different parts of the country to discuss key issues in sociology, both local and international. Perhaps for obvious reasons, these often focus on current and emerging crises – the environmental, geopolitical, welfare and other ‘wicked problems’ of our time. Such crises are so often the bread and butter of academic sociological research, a ‘crisis science’ with subjects ‘emerging from and responding to profound modern social transformations’, as SAANZ describes it.
Given the findings from Health+Law’s national legal needs study (LeNS) have to date been worrying, this was something of a challenge. The LeNS included an in-depth survey of over 1000 people and interviews with over 135 across Australia, all of whom were living either with HIV or hepatitis B, or both conditions. The study was designed to identify and understand people’s unmet legal needs and how these affect their health and wellbeing. And many of the results have been stark. At conferences earlier in 2025, we described the number and magnitude of legal problems experienced by LeNS participants as ‘staggering’.
So how might we reconsider this burden of legal challenges – and the issues they create for individuals, including serious negative health impacts – in an optimistic light?
To focalise hope, our paper at SAANZ sought to emphasise the broader ‘sociology of knowledge’ contributions that LeNS and its findings are already making, and will continue to make, in the future. And, even more optimistically, the improvements to services, information, legal support, policy and the law that this new knowledge has already, and will continue to, inform.
As with other events at which the LeNS team has presented, our paper, delivered by Health+Law Chief Investigator Hamish Robertson, covered the scope and severity of legal issues people living with blood-borne viruses experience in everyday life, and the complex intersectional nature of law, public health and citizenship that characterise the findings of the project. The audience in Wellington heard a broad overview of LeNS, its design and development, key engagement processes with community research partners and participants, and the study’s main findings.
While many of our findings are undeniably cause for concern, there are also reasons to be hopeful, not least of which is the potential for these results to galvanise positive, targeted systems change.
For one, the evidence assembled by LeNS is the most substantial contribution of data on the legal issues faced by people living with blood-borne viruses in Australia in decades, and possibly ever. The study’s findings are also practical, in that they quantify key issues, and they are strategic, because they can inform current and future research-to-practice work.
Such translational work is already underway in outputs and projects that we have produced in collaboration with our community partners. A few examples include: a national scoping review of resources and information about migration for people living with HIV in Australia; an updated digital version of HIV Legal, providing healthcare professionals and communities with critical legal information related to HIV care; an online FAQ on hepatitis B visa and migration that has become one of the most accessed resources on the LiverWELL website. Further resources, including a national network of specialist, blood-borne virus-responsive legal and migration service providers, a legal needs screening and referral tool, and two major online training courses for clinicians, lawyers and migration agents – all devised to strengthen the support of clients living with blood-borne viruses – are nearing completion and will be launched early in 2026. All of these provide updated information and advice across important legal areas – areas like migration information and support, obligations to disclose HIV or hepatitis B status in relationships, work, education and healthcare contexts, and more.
In all of our activities, there is huge ‘intersectional value-add’ by including partners who work in service delivery, advocacy and other activities directly with communities. Hopefully, such work also extends back through the funding (and data collection) chain to include government policymakers and service designers at state, territory and federal levels. In other words, the data collected and analysed in LeNS can make an ongoing contribution to a cross-sector, civil society and official government understanding of and response to the legal issues faced by people living with blood-borne viruses. In taking the partnership approach to research seriously, that is our hope.
Another reason to stay hopeful: this kind of research project creates potential benefits to current and future academic researchers, too, because it establishes a new method for examining the justiciable issues experienced by people living with blood-borne viruses. As these issues are sometimes highly complex, this is no small thing. Our method – which starts from the ‘ground up’ – has much potential to explain how the law informs and affects health and social outcomes, while providing new ways to conceive of the legal determinants of health. As we continue to drill into the huge amount of data collected, we expect to understand more about specific intersections of life, health and law. How does living with hepatitis B intersect with family law? How does it complicate access to higher education?
All of this new knowledge can then help guide us toward how best to address these issues. And, as more of these issues are highlighted and understood, the research has the capacity to support people within the multiple sub-groups, or ‘priority populations’ who are affected by blood-borne viruses – women, LGBTQIA+ people, migrants, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, and more.
As well as practical responses to the issues identified, like the development of new, cross-sector resources and information like those mentioned above, this can also provide benchmarking for development over time, and through which we can measure improvements for key populations. This means that our partners can track things like key service indicators (e.g. numbers of referrals) and real-life improvements for people seeking help.
The findings of any form of research are their own thing: they are what we now know that we didn’t know before. And this, in and of itself, offers hope. When we work collectively to add new knowledge about peoples’ lived experience, we are according a form of dignity and significance to that experience. Even with challenging times – and ongoing social crises – doubtlessly ahead of us, this contributes a little beauty and joy that would not otherwise be present.
Health+Law’s goal is that LeNS continues to contribute to changes that address the scope and severity of legal problems faced by people living with blood-borne viruses, both in Australia and around the world. This has huge potential to improve the health and wellbeing of many people. When we submit a project update to the SAANZ conference in Auckland this year in December, we are hope there will be more joy and beauty to report.