Plural Legal Orders: Concept and Practice

This chapter examines how we think about questions of plurality and the relations between legal orders. It does so through a specific history of the engagement between Indigenous legal orders and the Australian common law from the perspective of the latter. This chapter approaches legal plurality through the specific lens of thinking, both conceptually and practically, with jurisdiction. It looks at the ways in which the technology of jurisdiction has worked to obscure Indigenous legal orders and hence plurality. The chapter notes the increasing division between the approach of the High Court of Australia to plurality – as a matter to be contained or ignored – and the increasingly careful histories being written of our plural pasts and present