ABSTRACT
For Indigenous people, legal records and archives are ‘time bombs', ‘violent collisions of worlds'. Law's Documents represents our effort to capture and re-think law's relationship with the documentary form. In law, a ‘document' can be anything that includes writing, marks, figures, symbols and perforations; it can include maps, plans, drawings and photographs; and can contain sounds and images. The document is the exemplar par excellence of legal authority. In legal scholarship, law's reliance on textual modes of expression has led to particular interest in legal forms of materiality through investigating ‘legal media of inscription, their circulation and interpretation'. Documents—in manifold and multiple forms—perform, proliferate and perpetuate the law. Taken individually, the explorations of contributors provide rich critical analysis of diverse forms of legal documents and of their power, meanings and mediations across time and space.
