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1st Edition

Legal Education Through an Indigenous Lens Decolonising the Law School

Edited By Nicole Watson, Heather Douglas Copyright 2025

318 Pages

by Routledge

318 Pages

by Routledge

Description

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 colonisation and intergenerational trauma, institutional racism and exclusion. This section... Read more

Table of Contents

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 an 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 Is 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

Editor(s)

Biography

Nicole Watson is a Mununjali and Birri Gubba woman from south-east Queensland. She is Professor of Law at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS), Australia.

Heather Douglas, whose heritage is Scottish and Irish, is Professor of Law at The University of Melbourne, Australia.

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