Book contents
- The Cambridge Legal History of Australia
- The Cambridge Legal History of Australia
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Maps
- Contributors
- Maps
- 1 Editors’ Introduction
- I Cultures of Law
- II Public Authority
- III Public Authorities in Encounter
- IV Land and Environment
- V Social Organisation
- VI Social Ordering
- 25 Criminal Law and the Administration of Justice in Early New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land
- 26 Criminal Justice after the Convicts: A History of the Long Twentieth Century
- 27 Indigenous Peoples and Settler Criminal Law
- 28 Civil Wrongs
- 29 Labour Law
- 30 Place and Race in Australian Copyright Law: May Gibbs’s and Albert Namatjira’s Copyright
- VII Reckonings
- Index
28 - Civil Wrongs
from VI - Social Ordering
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 August 2022
- The Cambridge Legal History of Australia
- The Cambridge Legal History of Australia
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Maps
- Contributors
- Maps
- 1 Editors’ Introduction
- I Cultures of Law
- II Public Authority
- III Public Authorities in Encounter
- IV Land and Environment
- V Social Organisation
- VI Social Ordering
- 25 Criminal Law and the Administration of Justice in Early New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land
- 26 Criminal Justice after the Convicts: A History of the Long Twentieth Century
- 27 Indigenous Peoples and Settler Criminal Law
- 28 Civil Wrongs
- 29 Labour Law
- 30 Place and Race in Australian Copyright Law: May Gibbs’s and Albert Namatjira’s Copyright
- VII Reckonings
- Index
Summary
Since the beginning of white settlement in Australia, the law of civil wrongs has reflected a tension between the constraints imposed by being part of an imperial structure which formally mandated ‘one common law’ for the empire with the need for the law of civil wrongs to be appropriate to the different social and environmental conditions in Australia. For much of this history, genuine attempts by Australian legislatures and courts to adapt the law of civil wrongs were masked by the self-identification of Australian lawyers as members of the British race, of which the common law was a cultural artefact, and the resultant need to identify local legal development as within that tradition. This chapter attempts to unpack the rhetoric from the reality. It argues that, from the very first, there was a distinct pluralism that operated within the law of civil wrongs in Australia, one that allowed for Australian exceptionalism that remained within the accepted limits of the one common law approach.
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- Information
- The Cambridge Legal History of Australia , pp. 651 - 670Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2022