ABSTRACT
The cross-cultural ‘case study’ is, we suspect, a lot more common in law curricula today than even 10 years ago. Yet the focus in such studies as ‘Aborigines and the Law’ is on detailing the injustices or, conversely, the possibilities for justice faced by Aborigines when confronting ‘the law’, and so the actual content or insights of Aboriginal law itself is only ‘incidental to such questions as whether Aborigines should be entitled to invoke “their” law and to be correspondingly exempt from the application of “white” law’.94 That monolith, ‘white law’, remains unchallenged for settler Australians, despite the fact that ‘our history of ideas includes that of more than 40 millennia of Aboriginal presence’. The challenge is how settler Australians allow insights gleaned from intercultural encounters to form their idea of what law is or ought to be. A similar challenge in a different context has been posed by anthropologist James Clifford: ‘What would it require, for example, consistently to associate the inventive, resilient, enormously varied societies of Melanesia with the cultural future of the planet? How might ethnographies be differently conceived if this standpoint could be seriously adopted?’95
