ABSTRACT
Imagine a large public teaching hospital located nearby to a law school. People are being born, others are dying. The corridors are full of hurrying clinicians, nurses and patients on trolleys. The casualty department is hectic, its staff busy treating the victims of injuries or sudden events such as stroke or heart attack. Its wards are full of patients suffering from a range of diseases. If indigenous Australians are being treated (and they are far more likely to be admitted to hospital than other Australians for a variety of conditions including infectious and parasitic conditions, injuries and respiratory problems),3 it is likely that the staff will be seeing a range of diseases, many of which their lecturers would have told them had been eradicated from mainstream Australia decades ago. In the far quieter corridors of a law school it is also ‘business as usual’, lectures and tutorials are given and cases are read and argued through. Students grapple with theories and speculate what the law is and sometimes what it might be.
