Legal Education Through an Indigenous Lens: Decolonising the Law School

This book provides a comprehensive resource for accommodating and pursuing Indigenous perspectives in legal education.

The book is divided into three sections. The first section highlights the continuing issues that Indigenous people face in law schools, and universities, including the ongoing impacts of colonization and intergenerational trauma, institutional racism and exclusion, and the denial of historical acts of institutional theft. This section also includes chapters that explore arguments for the recognition of Indigenous legal knowledge, of knowledge about the impact of settler law, and the incorporation of Indigenous concepts, laws and ways of thinking about settler law across the curriculum. The second section explores how Indigenous ways of reading and thinking about settler law make a difference to how settler law is understood and interpreted. Contributors consider the power of storytelling, and of situating Indigenous law as a form of natural law; they also address the prospect of law’s decolonization. The third section of the book grapples with how traditional law school subjects can be taught through an Indigenous lens, including torts, public law, property, and criminal law and sentencing. Throughout, the book demonstrates the importance of, and offers practical advice for, teaching law in a way that includes critical Indigenous perspectives.

This book will be of enormous value to teachers, researchers and students in law, legal studies, and indigenous studies, as well as others with an interest in decolonizing legal education.

table of content

1. Introduction: Decolonising the Law School

Heather Douglas and Nicole Watson

 

Part One: Recognising that Terra Nullius Never Left, and Reimagining Law and Legal Education to Achieve our Own Ends

2. Indigenous Lawyering: Colonial Legal Formations and Decolonial Manoeuvres

Osca Monaghan

3. Evidence Given by Eddie Cubillo to the Yoorrook Justice Commission

Eddie Cubillo and Jaynaya Dwyer

4. The Shackles of Terra Nullius in Child Protection ‘Reforms’

Terri Libesman, Paul Gray and Kirsten Gray

5. ‘Who Built this Fence?’ Regenerating Faculty Landscapes for Lasting Educational Reform

Simon Young and Kirstie Smith

6. Challenges and Strategies for Incorporating Indigenous Laws and Histories Across Legal Education Curriculum

Annette Gainsford, Alison Gerard and Emma Colvin

 

Part Two: Changing Thinking through Theory

7. Storytelling – The Power of First Nations Jurisprudence

Larissa Behrendt

8. Genre Outlaw: Ruby Langford Ginibi

Suvendrini Perera

9. Relationality as Indigenous Teaching Praxis in Legal Education

Marcelle Burns

10. Decolonising the Common Law: Beyond Colonial Thinking

Pekeri Ruska and Jennifer Nielsen

11. Legal Education and First Nations Teaching and Learning Methodologies: Storytelling/Yarning, Deep Listening, and Lived Experience

Narelle Bedford

 

Part Three: Applying an Indigenous Lens to Law School Curricula

12. Teaching Students to Appreciate the Significance of the Plaintiff’s Aboriginality in Intentional Torts Cases

Nicole Watson

13. Reflecting on the ‘General Part’ When There is Systemic Injustice: Do we Inadvertently Facilitate Overcriminalisation of First Peoples in Australia?

Mary Spiers Williams

14. What’s Aristotle’s Totem Anyway? Indigenous Systems of Law and Governance and the Australian Public Law Curriculum

Aurora Milroy and Karinda Burns

15. Unsettling Australian Clinical Legal Education

Amanda Porter and Eddie Cubillo

16. Native Title: Steps Toward a Decolonised Law Curriculum

Lee Godden