The Cambridge Legal History of Australia

Description

Featuring contributions from leading lawyers, historians and social scientists, this path-breaking volume explores encounters of laws, people, and places in Australia since 1788. Its chapters address three major themes: the development of Australian settler law in the shadow of the British Empire; the interaction between settler law and First Nations people; and the possibility of meaningful encounter between First laws and settler legal regimes in Australia. Several chapters explore the limited space provided by Australian settler law for respectful encounters, particularly in light of the High Court's particular concerns about the fragility of Australian sovereignty. Tracing the development of a uniquely Australian law and the various contexts that shaped it, this volume is concerned with the complexity, plurality, and ambiguity of Australia's legal history.

Peter Cane has written widely in areas of public law, private law and legal theory. He is co-editor (with H. Kumarasingham) of The Cambridge Constitutional History of the United Kingdom and author of Controlling Administrative Power: An Historical Comparison (2016). He is a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy and a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia. Lisa Ford is Professor of History at UNSW, Sydney. A prize-winning legal historian whose work explores jurisdictional politics in the United States and the British Empire to 1850, she is author of The King's Peace (2021) and Settler Sovereignty (2010), and co-author (with L. Benton) of Rage for Order (2016). She is a Fellow of the Academy of Humanities in Australia. Dr Mark McMillan is a Wiradjuri man from Trangie in New South Wales who was NAIDOC scholar of the year in 2013. Dr McMillan has published widely on the achievement of human rights for Australian Indigenous people, recovering Indigenous self-governance and promoting settler recognition for Indigenous law in Australia.

'This superb volume showcases the sparkling insights and deep research that have placed Australian legal history at the forefront of global scholarship on interactions of Indigenous, imperial, and settler law. A stunning achievement.' Lauren Benton, Yale University