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Australian Legal Histories in Context

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 October 2011

Rosemary Hunter
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Extract

Australian legal history has only emerged as a field of scholarship in its own right in the last twenty years. Prior to that, Australian legal history tended to be written and taught as a footnote to the great sweep of English legal history—the history of the king's courts, the common law and equity, and major nineteenth-century statutory reforms, with a chapter at the end about the classification of the Australian colonies as “settled” colonies, and the consequent reception of English law. This year (2002) sees the twentieth anniversary of Alex Castles's groundbreaking work An Australian Legal History, the first book to take Australian laws and legal institutions as its entire subject matter. It is also the twentieth anniversary of the first Australian Law and History Conference. The years since 1982 have seen the advent of the Australian and New Zealand Law and History Society, increasing attendances at its annual conferences, the establishment of the Australian Journal of Legal History, the completion of a number of Ph.D.theses in the field, and the publication of further influential texts and edited collections by (among others) the authors of the two articles featured in this forum. Two of the most productive strands in this developing literature have concerned the history of colonization and the dispossession of indigenous peoples and histories of women and gender relations in law, although these are by no means that only areas that have been explored. Running through much of this literature, too, are themes of imperial-colonial relations, and relations between law and colonial economies and societies, particularly prior to federation in 1901.

Type
Forum: Comment
Information
Law and History Review , Volume 21 , Issue 3 , Fall 2003 , pp. 607 - 614
Copyright
Copyright © the American Society for Legal History, Inc. 2003

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References

1. E.g., Windeyer, W. J. V., Lectures on Legal History, 2d ed. (Sydney: Law Book Co., 1957).Google Scholar

2. Castles, Alex C., An Australian Legal History (Sydney: Law Book Co., 1982).Google Scholar

3. Kirkby, Diane and Colebome, Catharine, “Introduction,” in Law, History, Colonialism: The Reach of Empire, ed. Kirkby, Diane and Coleborne, Catherine (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 1–5, at 1.Google Scholar

4. Kercher, Bruce, An Unruly Child (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1995)Google Scholar; Kercher, Bruce, Debt, Seduction and Other Disasters (Sydney: Federation Press, 1996)Google Scholar; Golder, Hilary, Divorce in Nineteenth-Century New South Wales (Sydney: New South Wales University Press, 1985)Google Scholar; Kirkby, Diane, ed., Sex, Power and Justice: Historical Perspectives on Law in Australia (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1995)Google Scholar; Kirkby and Coleborne, eds., Law, History, Colonialism.

5. See in particular Reynolds, Henry, The Law of the Land (Melbourne: Penguin, 1987)Google Scholar, and also Mathew, Penelope, Hunter, Rosemary and Charlesworth, Hilary, “Law and History in Black and White,” in Thinking about Law: Perspectives on the History, Philosophy and Sociology of Labt, ed. Hunter, Rosemary, Ingleby, Richard, and Johnstone, Richard (Sydney, Allen and Unwin, 1995), 3–37.Google Scholar

6. See in particular Kirkby, ed., Sex, Power and Justice; Allen, Judith, Sex and Secrets (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1990)Google Scholar.

7. Kercher, Bruce, “Perish or Prosper: The Law and Convict Transportation in the British Empire, 1700–1850,” Law and History Review 21 (2003): 548.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8. Ibid., 564.

9. Ibid., 584.

10. Ibid., 559.

11. Ibid., 550.

12. Ibid., 557.

13. Golder, Hilary and Kirkby, Diane, “Mrs. Mayne and Her Boxing Kangaroo: A Married Woman Tests Her Property Rights in Colonial New South Wales,” Law and History Review 21 (2003): 587.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

14. Ibid., 601.

15. Ibid., 601.

16. E.g., Peter Fitzpatrick, “Terminal Legality: Imperialism and the (De)composition of Law,” in Law, History, Colonialism, ed., Kirkby and Coleborne, 9–25, and more generally Fitzpatrick, Peter, The Mythology of Modern Law (London: Routledge, 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Fitzpatrick, Peter, Modernism and the Grounds of Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

17. See, e.g., the various essays in Law, History, Colonialism, ed. Kirkby and Coleborne, which cover experiences in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the U.S., South Africa, and the Pacific.

18. Golder and Kirkby, “Mrs. Mayne and Her Boxing Kangeroo,” 585.

19. Others are Rob McQueen and Suzanne Corcoran.

20. Friedman, Lawrence M., “Opening the Time Capsule: A Progress Report on Studies of Courts over Time,” in Law in History: Histories of Law and Society, ed. Sugarman, David (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 1:493–504bGoogle Scholar, at 494; Christopher Tomlins, “How Who Rides Whom: Recent ‘New’ Histories of American Labor Law and What They May Signify,” in ibid., 585–605, at 589–90.

21. Golder and Kirkby, “Mrs. Mayne and Her Boxing Kangeroo,” 595.

22. Kercher, “Perish or Prosper,” 564.

23. Golder and Kirkby, “Mrs. Mayne and Her Boxing Kangeroo,” 587.

24. E.g., Christopher Tomlins, “Law's Empire: Chartering English Colonies on the American Mainland in the Seventeenth Century,” in Law, History, Colonialism, ed. Kirkby and Coleborne, 26–45.

25. Genovese, Ann, “The Battered Body,” Australian Feminist Studies 25 (April 1997): 91CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Genovese, Ann, “The Politics of Naming: '70s Feminisms, Genealogy and ‘Domestic Violence,’” in Anatomies of Violence: An Interdisciplinary Investigation, ed. Walker, Ruth, Brass, Kylie, and Byron, John (Sydney: Research Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Sydney, 2000), 115.Google Scholar

26. Peter Charles Hoffer, “Text, Translation, Context, Conversation: Preliminary Notes for Decoding the Deliberations of the Advisory Committee That Wrote the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure,” in Law in History, ed. Sugarman, 505–35.

27. Constance Backhouse, Ann Curthoys, Ian Duncanson, and Ann Parsonson, “‘Race,’ Gender and Nation in History and Law” in Law, History, Colonialism, ed. Kirkby and Cole-borne, 277–300, at 296.