ABSTRACT
State support of customary law in criminal cases would seem to reinforce the High Court’s recognition of customary law as the foundation of native title. The legislation was intended to police juvenile crime in remote communities through the policed agency of traditional culture, thereby unburdening state resources. The Native Title Act was passed by the federal parliament in 1993 and significantly amended in 1995, as a response to the High Court decision Eddie Mabo v State of Queensland, which recognized native titles having existed in Australia when it was colonized. State law is characterized and made to behave as a neutral referee, establishing as a matter of fact the contemporary relationship between a people and their own abstract traditional orders and mediating the limit of tolerance. The chapter concludes with a discussion of possible counter-ethics of social space that veers off the matrix of liberal humanism.
