Suchergebnisse

This essay makes a theoretical argument for reimagining 'the rule of law' in light of 'legal pluralism'. Building on the work of Desmond Manderson and Roderick Macdonald in particular, the essay considers what it means for law's pluralism—the differences that animate the everyday life of law—to be the very pulse of its rule. In doing so, the essay seeks to open the frame that has been placed around the rule of law in two ways. On one side: to see beyond the law that is made intelligible through institutionalized modes of expression to the law that is made sensible through the richly expressive media of human culture (thus opening the frame around the 'law' that is seen to rule). And on the other side: to see beyond law as a mode of governance to law in the everyday lives of subjects (thus opening the frame around how this law is seen to 'rule'). The result is a reimagination of the rule of law as a broadly socio-cultural phenomenon rather than a narrowly legal-institutional arrangement. The essay proceeds in two steps, beginning with law's pluralism before turning to law's rule.

There remains a puzzle as to the status of Indigenous land rights in Australian colonial law. The common view is that the laws of the British colonies, and subsequently of the federated state, did not recognise Indigenous land rights until late in the 20th century. Against this, a smaller body of scholarship argues that recognition had already occurred much earlier, the clearest instance being in the colony of South Australia in the 1830s and 1840s. The result is an apparent duplicity in the colonial law, whereby Indigenous land rights appear to have been both recognised and denied. The article shows a tendency in the scholarly literature to resolve this duplicity in absolute terms, based on positivist analysis of law. In contrast, by taking a critical legal pluralist approach, the article shows how different and even contradictory manifestations of the same law subsisted simultaneously through time. This both sheds new light on the question of the recognition of Indigenous land rights in Australian colonial law, and contributes theoretically to 'critical legal pluralism' by developing its temporal dimension.