The Deep Colonizing Practices of the Australian Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody

This paper demonstrates how legal processes utilized by institutions established to reverse the effects of colonization, can continue the colonizing agenda. The processes reflect 'deep' rather than 'de-'colonizing practices. The Australian Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody (RCIADIC), which tabled its National Report over a decade ago and which was heralded as the inquiry which would transform race politics for Indigenous Australians, is used as an example of a 'decolonizing' institution that inadvertently adopted deep colonizing practices. Using data from interviews with 48 Indigenous and non-Indigenous people who were associated with the RCIADIC, this paper expands Deborah Bird Rose's theoretical construct of 'deep colonizing practices' and illustrates how difficult it is to shift hegemonic legal processes and beliefs, despite intentions to empower and embrace Indigenous views.     

Authorship,Authenticity, and Intellectual Property in Australian Aboriginal Art

This article analyzes research and legal cases about authorship, authenticity, and intellectual property in Aboriginal art. The concepts of Aboriginality, authenticity, and ownership are used to show the complexities of Aboriginal law, legal copyright, and the moral rights framework. The clan ownership of Dreaming makes Aboriginal artists' relationship different to other artists' individual ownership of their work. Research on this topic by members of the Faculty of Business and Law unit of the Centre for Leisure Management Research at Deakin University was undertaken for the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies. This article provides significant contextual analyses of major issues leading to Commonwealth Government inquiries and legislation in Australia during 2006-8.     

Across Islands and Oceans: Re-imagining Colonial Violence in the Past and the Present

Law and Critique - The three texts addressed in this review essay challenge us to question and creatively re-imagine the representation of material spaces at the centre of the colonial project:...     

Don't Mention the War: The Court of Appeal,the Criminal Cases Review Commission and Dealing with the Past in Northern Ireland

Despite the vast transitional justice scholarship relating to prisoner release, amnesties and prosecutions when conflicts end, there is a significant gap in practice and academic literature regarding wrongful convictions. Uniquely amongst post‐conflict societies, Northern Ireland has a body for investigating miscarriages of justice, albeit one designed for ‘ordinary’ appeals. In the absence of a formal truth‐recovery process, criminal appeals are becoming a proxy for addressing the role of the state during ‘The Troubles,’ as well as remedying individual injustices. This article examines the approach of the Northern Ireland Court of Appeal during the conflict. It charts the developments in its decision‐making following the cease‐fires and the establishment of the Criminal Cases Review Commission. It concludes that the current system is unsatisfactory as it ignores the effects of the conflict on the appeal process and offers no insights into the role of the Court during the conflict. Alternative models are suggested.     

Correction to: Coronial Inquests,Indigenous Suicide and the Colonial Narrative

Critical Criminology -     

Evaluating the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa

Provides a review of Gibson’s (2004) evaluation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) of South Africa. Offers a background to the TRC process then reckons with Gibson’s study in terms of his procedures, the context, the issue of “race”, the truth claims of the TRC, a digression on amnesty, and finally the link between truth and reconciliation. Concludes that this study offers substantial support for the TRC process. A review of James L. Gibson (2004) Overcoming Apartheid: Can Truth Reconcile a Divided Nation? New York: Russell Sage Foundation; Cape Town: HSRC Press, pp. 467.     

The Irreducible Core of the Duty of Care,Skill and Diligence of Company Directors: Australian Securities and Investments Commission v Healey

The decision in ASIC v Healey raises hitherto unexplored questions about the standard of care of non‐executive directors in monitoring the production of financial statements. More particularly, it considers the power of directors to delegate areas of responsibility requiring specialist knowledge and the degree of permissible reliance on professional advisers. The reasoning of the judge will doubtless prove helpful to the English courts not only in relation to duty of care issues under section 174 of the Companies Act 2006, but also when considering the duty to exercise independent judgment which is now restated in section 173.     

The Challenge of Institutional Integrity in Responsive Regulation: Field Inspections by the Australian Taxation Office

Based on responsive regulation, the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) Compliance Model was developed as a way of dealing with the complexities of the Australian tax system. This article demonstrates some of the challenges that come with introducing responsive regulation into a bureaucracy such as the ATO. Selznick's ideas of institutional integrity provide a conceptual framework that allows the regulatory agency engaged in responsive regulation to emphasize voluntary compliance and the building of positive relationships with the regulatee, while simultaneously ensuring that non-compliance is both detected and dealt with. Using evidence from a qualitative study of ATO "walk-ins" with used car dealers, the article demonstrates the unintended consequences that can occur without institutional integrity both at the level of design and at the level of everyday ATO field-officer practices.     

Population data from the New South Wales Aboriginal Australian sub-population for the profiler plus autosomal short tandem repeat (STR) loci

It is a requirement that forensic DNA profiling evidence be accompanied by an estimation of its weight, in order that the court can assign an appropriate probative value to it during legal proceedings. There are various models by which this estimation can be made, but each relies on approximations of the allele frequencies in the relevant population. This report provides the results of population genetic analyses at nine autosomal short tandem repeat (STR) loci for the Aboriginal Australian sub-population of New South Wales, Australia.     

The Commission and the Police

The major conclusions advanced in the 1967 report by the U.S. President's Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice under President Johnson are reviewed in this article. Six of the Commission's visions for law enforcement are described, and subsequent changes in the character of American policing are traced. Many of the concerns of the Commission linger until this day. Progress on many fronts has been halting, their impact more muted than reformers had hoped, and the framework of institutions that define law enforcement in the United States has proved remarkably resistant to change.     

Freedom, Law, and the Colonial Project

In this essay I develop a Marxist-informed anticolonialist position, and from this position I assess the role of law in the early Canadian settler-state. I claim that the flexibility of law is a measure of its restitutive and exploitative facets, such facets that operate dialectically as a means of moderating between the settler-state’s liberal democratic ideals (e.g. individual freedom and enfranchisement) and its capitalist imperatives (e.g. privatization of land, expansion, and profit). Law plays an integral role in this context because, by performing this moderating function, it stabilizes the socio-economic order of the emergent settler-state. In the second half of this essay, I enrich my theoretical analysis by examining the variable legal subjectivity of early Ukrainian immigrants to Canada. This historical perspective allows me to illuminate the intricacies of the logic that informs law’s flexibility, and to show how the liberal democratic principle of freedom was—and continues to be—both extolled and compromised by the law’s moderating function.     

The Fall and Renewal of the Commission: Accountability, Contract and Administrative Organisation

The fall of the Santer Commission, prompted by the Report of the Committee of Independent Experts, sent shock waves throughout the entire Community. This article seeks to examine the nature of the problems which beset the Commission, to place these within the broader context of decision-making by public bodies, and to consider also the responsibilities of the Council and European Parliament for the delivery of agreed Community policies. The article analyses in detail the Reports of the Committee of Independent Experts, and the subsequent reforms initiated by the Prodi Commission, in order to assess the prospects for improved service delivery in the future.     

“Going to Law”: Reflections on Law,Religion, and Mitra Sharafi's Law and Identity in Colonial South Asia

This essay explores religion's need for law, comparing the story told in Mitra Sharafi's Law and Identity in Colonial South Asia (2014)—about the virtual hijacking of British colonial law to serve the communal religious needs of Parsis in colonial India—to other contexts in which secular and religious legal systems have built symbiotic relationships, including in the United States and Thailand. It concludes by urging a reweaving of religious and legal histories after the critique of secularism and its shadows, separationism, and antinomianism.