A judicial revolution occurred in 1992 when Australia's highest court discarded a doctrine that had stood for two hundred years, that the country was a terra nullius - a land of no one - when the white man arrived. The proceedings were known as the Mabo Case, named for Eddie Koiki Mabo, the Torres Strait Islander who fought the notion that the Australian Aboriginal people did not have a system of land ownership before European colonization. The case had international repercussions, especially on the four countries in which English-settlers are the dominant population: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States. In Recognizing Aboriginal Title, Peter H. Russell offers a comprehensive study of the Mabo case, its background, and its consequences, contextualizing it within the international struggle of Indigenous peoples to overcome their colonized status. Russell weaves together an historical narrative of Mabo's life with an account of the legal and ideological premises of European imperialism and their eventual challenge by the global forces of decolonization. He traces the development of Australian law and policy in relation to Aborigines, and provides a detailed examination of the decade of litigation that led to the Mabo case. Mabo died at the age of fifty-six just five months before the case was settled. Although he had been exiled from his land over a dispute when he was a teenager, he was buried there as a hero. Recognizing Aboriginal Title is a work of enormous importance by a legal and constitutional scholar of international renown, written with a passion worthy of its subject - a man who fought hard for his people and won.

In this book, Peter H. Russell offers a comprehensive study of the Mabo case, its background, and its consequences, contextualizing it within the international struggle of indigenous peoples to overcome colonized status. --book jacket.

Delgamuukw. Mabo. Ngati Apa. Recent cases have created a framework for litigating Aboriginal title in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. The distinguished group of scholars whose work is showcased here, however, shows that our understanding of where the concept of Aboriginal title came from – and where it may be going – can also be enhanced by exploring legal developments in these former British colonies in a comparative, multidisciplinary framework. This path-breaking book offers a perspective on Aboriginal title that extends beyond national borders to consider similar developments in common law countries.

Aboriginal title represents one of the most remarkable and controversial legal developments in the common law world of the late-twentieth century. Overnight it changed the legal position of indigenous peoples. The common law doctrine gave sudden substance to the tribes' claims to justiciable property rights over their traditional lands, catapulting these up the national agenda and jolting them out of a previous culture of governmental inattention. In a series of breakthrough cases national courts adopted the argument developed first in western Canada, and then New Zealand and Australia by a handful of influential scholars. By the beginning of the millennium the doctrine had spread to Malaysia, Belize, southern Africa and had a profound impact upon the rapid development of international law of indigenous peoples' rights. This book is a history of this doctrine and the explosion of intellectual activity arising from this inrush of legalism into the tribes' relations with the Anglo settler state. The author is one of the key scholars involved from the doctrine's appearance in the early 1980s as an exhortation to the courts, and a figure who has both witnessed and contributed to its acceptance and subsequent pattern of development. He looks critically at the early conceptualisation of the doctrine, its doctrinal elaboration in Canada and Australia - the busiest jurisdictions - through a proprietary paradigm located primarily (and constrictively) inside adjudicative processes. He also considers the issues of inter-disciplinary thought and practice arising from national legal systems' recognition of aboriginal land rights, including the emergent and associated themes of self-determination that surfaced more overtly during the 1990s and after. The doctrine made modern legal history, and it is still making it.

Coming to Terms challenges conventional thinking about Aboriginal title in South Australia. It does so by examining the legal consequences of provisions in the State's founding documents that reserve or protect Aboriginal rights to land.

A detailed study of the engagement of state law with indigenous rights to water in comparative legal and policy contexts.

This book provides a strikingly original explanation of the Britain's treatment of sovereignty and native title in its Australasian colonies.

Cover image: Clinton Nain, Crowned Target, 2006, acrylic and bitumen on canvas, 152 x 122 cmWhen Australians today debate how to achieve a just postcolonial relationship with the First Peoples of the continent, they typically do so using the language of 'constitutional recognition'. The idea of constitutional recognition has become the subject of community forums and nationwide inquiries, street protests and prime ministerial speeches. Dylan Lino's book provides the first comprehensive study of Indigenous constitutional recognition in Australia.Offering more than a legal analysis, Lino places the idea of constitutional recognition into a broader historical and theoretical perspective. After recounting the history of Australian debates on Indigenous recognition, the book presents an account that views constitutional recognition in terms of Indigenous peoples' struggles to have their identities respected within the settler constitutional order. When studied in this way, constitutional recognition emerges not as a postcolonial endpoint but as an ongoing process of renegotiating the basic Indigenous-settler political relationship.With First Peoples continuing to press for the recognition of their sovereignty and peoplehood, this book will be a definitive reference point for scholars, advocates, policy-makers and the interested public.Dr Dylan Lino, Constitutional Recognition of Australia's Indigenous People: Law, History and Politics (original title), was the winner of the Holt Prize 2017.AUSPUBLAW presents Book Forum on Dylan Lino's Constitutional Recognition: First Peoples and the Australian Settler State, 14 August 2019Dani Larkin provides first post. "Dylan has provided readers and legal professionals alike with a very useful and educational book that better informs current issues surrounding Indigenous constitutional recognition." Click here to readThe Hon Robert French AC provides the second post. "[The book] will inform ongoing debate about constitutional recognition to those who are seriously engaged in it. It also, and particularly, is a valuable addition to the scholarly literature on recognition for First Peoples in Australia." Click here to readDylan Lino replies to reflections from Dani Larkin and the Hon Robert French AC. "Putting a book out into the world is, among many other things, exhilarating and anxiety-inducing. The exhilaration and anxiety come from the prospect of having other people actually read it, especially people with such brilliant minds and careful eyes as Dani Larkin and Robert French. I'm honoured and humbled at the evident brilliance and care with which both Larkin and French have engaged with my book..." Click here to read

Classical Aboriginal societies in Australia have commonly been described in terms of social organisation and local organisation. This book presents rich detail on a third and related domain that has not been given the same kind of attention: linguistic organisation. Basing their analyses on fieldwork among the Wik peoples of Cape York Peninsula, north Australia, Peter Sutton and Ken Hale show how cosmology, linguistic variation, language prehistory, clan totemic identities, geopolitics, land use and land ownership created a vibrant linguistic organisation in a classical Aboriginal society. This has been a society long in love with language and languages. Its people have richly imbued the domain of rights and interests in country—the foundations of their native title as recognised in Australian law—with rights and interests in the abundance of languages and dialects given to them at the start of the world.