Lara Tessaro is studying for her doctorate at the University of Kent Law School. Her thesis, ‘Cosmetic Compositions: enacting matter, time and law with Canadian cosmetic product labelling’, examines material and temporal features of cosmetics regulation in Canada, with a focus on cosmetic product labelling. She is especially interested in how exposure to ‘everyday toxics’ in personal care products can adversely affect human health. Despite the risk of low-dose exposures, and in stark contrast with pharmaceuticals, cosmetics are not subject to pre-market approval in Canada, instead being governed by labelling rules.
Lara’s research focuses on past legal practices that produced cosmetics labels in Canada and the material and temporal effects of cosmetics labelling law. These effects might involve injury, allergy, and toxicity and her work shows how these are associated with labelling practices. Working at the intersections of law, society, science, and technology and using archival methods, she is unearthing the foundations of cosmetics law and highlighting the gendered dynamics that permeate legal and regulatory practices. She hopes her research will lead to future regulatory action and her analysis of how toxicity itself is produced as a legal phenomenon is extending debates in socio-legal studies and science and technology studies about the materiality of law.
Lara’s work was awarded a national poster competition prize by the UK’s Socio-Legal Studies Association in 2021. She is co-author of ‘Toxic Conceptions: The assessment and regulation of male-mediated transgenerational effects of chemical exposures’ in the Canadian Journal of Women and the Law, and has blogged on ‘Ottawa’s weak action on flame retardants will harm Canadians’. She has been invited to publish an article in the leading Social and Legal Studies journal on ‘Registering the everyday: Documents, bureaucracy, and the socio-legal’.
Lara holds a Master of Laws from Osgoode Hall Law School, York University, a Bachelor of Laws and a BA (Hons) in International Relations and Economics, both from the University of Toronto and she has practiced environmental and administrative law in Canada. She has been recipient of a Kent Vice-Chancellor’s Scholarship and the SSHRC’s Joseph-Armand Bombardier Scholarship (which cannot be held outside Canada and so was converted to an SSHRC doctoral fellowship). She is teaching constitutional and administrative law courses at Kent and is an active contributor to her post-graduate community.
Lara was awarded the Platinum Maple Leaf Trust Scholarship 2022 – 2023
