ABSTRACT
The story of Australian and UK property law is often a sanitised tale of feudal tenure, title registration, arcane real property interests, and the legal fiction of terra nullius. This narrow legal account is not only wilfully ignorant of dispossession, invasion, and ongoing Indigenous property jurisprudence; it is also ignorant of its own rich, pluralist common law past. Yet very little of this vast and critical history is taught in the ordinary curriculum of property law, which instead largely continues to teach and entrench a structure of violence.
This chapter explores what it means to teach property as non-Indigenous Australian legal academics. Using case studies from law schools in the UK and Australia, this chapter critically examines the flawed colonial structures of property and its perpetuation of class, gender, and race inequalities over generations.
Through a re-emphasis on curriculum content, a re-evaluation of teaching methods, and a reappraisal of assessment design, this chapter seeks to articulate an optimistic and hopefully empowering reconceptualisation of a decolonised property pedagogy that is fit(ter) for its early 21st-century purpose.
