Legal History Tutorials
Legal History Tutorial
Legal History Tutorial – The history of Australian treatment of Aboriginal Customary law with particular reference to Succession law
On 3 March 2026, Professor Prue Vines (Faculty of Law, UNSW) presented a legal history tutorial on ‘The history of Australian treatment of Aboriginal Customary law with particular reference to Succession law’.
The level of recognition of Aboriginal Customary Law has varied across the period since 1788 in legal judgments. A great deal of information about Aboriginal customary law came originally from anthropologists who got it from Aboriginal people themselves, and now is more likely to come from authoritative Aboriginal people. Professor Vines attempts to address the question of whether the recognition of Aboriginal customary law is recognition of it as law, or merely as fact or custom. How recognition has happened, or what form it has taken, when it has happened at all, is complicated, but it is clearly strongly affected by the emphasis on the sovereignty of the common law. Does this matter? Is this a situation where the perfect might be the enemy of the good? The current use of Part 4.4 of the Succession Act 2006 (NSW) illustrates the conundrum.
Legal History Tutorial
Legal History Tutorial on Political Trust, Public Justification and Judicial Office
On Wednesday, 18 February 2026 at 5:15pm, Professor Paul B. Miller presented a legal history tutorial on Political Trust, Public Justification and Judicial Office in Court 12D in the Supreme Court of NSW.
Professor Paul B. Miller is the Robert and Marion Short Professor of Law and Associate Dean for International & Graduate Programs at Notre Dame Law School, where he also serves as Director of the Notre Dame Program on Private Law. Miller is a private law theorist whose work focuses on general jurisprudence as well as philosophical questions in equity, fiduciary law, trust law, agency, and corporate law. His books include Philosophical Foundations of Fiduciary Law, The Oxford Handbook of Fiduciary Law, and Civil Wrongs and Justice in Private Law. Miller is a member of the Editorial Board of the American Journal of Jurisprudence and serves (with John Oberdiek) as the Editor for Oxford Private Law Theory and the associated series, Oxford Studies in Private Law Theory, both published by Oxford University Press.
Occasional Lecture
Occasional Lecture on the Origin of the Doctrine of Mutual Wills
On 10 February 2026, an Occasional lecture on the origin of the doctrine of mutual wills was presented by Emeritus Professor Rosalind Croucher AM.
Legal History Tutorial
Medical Dominance and the Law: European Medical Exiles in Tasmania, 1933–1951
On 30 October 2025, Professor Gabrielle Wolf delivered a legal history tutorial in Court 13A, Law Courts Building. Gabrielle provided this abstract:
Doctors who escaped Nazi-occupied Europe and immigrated to Australia were greeted mostly with hostility by representatives of the local medical profession. Australian doctors agitated for amendment of legislation that governed registration of medical practitioners in each state, to remove any legal entitlement of the European medical exiles to practise medicine. Tasmania’s Parliament was the first Australian legislature to accede to these medical practitioners’ pressure, and did so before World War Two began. This presentation will explore why some Tasmanian doctors were especially eager to prevent the émigrés from practising medicine, and why they were able to achieve their objective so quickly. It will also reflect on this episode as a case study of how doctors attempted (with varying success) to use licensing laws to entrench the dominance of the medical profession.
Dr Gabrielle Wolf is a Professor in the Faculty of Law at Monash University. She obtained a Bachelor of Arts (with Honours), Bachelor of Laws and PhD in history from the University of Melbourne. Gabrielle has published her research on the current and past regulation of health practitioners, public health law, health records, sentencing law and theatre history. She previously worked as a judge’s research associate and as a lawyer in private practice and in-house. Her research was supported by a grant from the Forbes Fund in 2023.
Legal History Tutorial
Corporate Reforms and the Emergence of Proprietary Companies in Victoria in 1896
On Thursday 18 September 2025, Associate Professor Marina Nehme from the Faculty of Law and Justice at the University of New South Wales presented a legal history tutorial in Court 13A, Law Courts Marina provided this abstract:
Proprietary companies, also known as private companies, were first enacted in Victorian corporate law at the end of the nineteenth century. Today, they are the most common type of companies used by businesses. Their activities, however, can be shrouded in secrecy with limited accountability to the public. Around the time of their introduction in Victoria, there was social and political upheaval as a range of corporate failures left many people destitute and the corporate collapses were one of the reasons behind the stagnation of the Victorian economy. In view of this reality, the presentation examines the motivation behind the introduction of the proprietary company in Victoria as, from one perspective, creating a company that has very little regulation applying to it was contradictory to the reason why corporate law reforms were taking place in the 1890s. To get an understanding of situation, the focus of the presentation is on reviewing the policy making processes through the use of Kingdon’s Multi Streams Approach, to study the internal mechanism of agenda setting attached to the enactment of the 1896 corporate legislation and the introduction of proprietary companies in Victoria.
Marina is an Associate Professor in the School of Private and Commercial Law in the Faculty of Law and Justice at the University of New South Wales. She is recognised internationally for her substantial body of work on negotiated settlements, known as enforceable undertakings. Her articles on this topic have provided insight into how this sanction is used by corporate and environmental regulators, filling an important gap in the literature and providing policy makers with the tools needed to perfect regulatory reliance on this sanction. Marina has also written reports on the use of enforceable undertakings and product intervention orders to the Australian Securities and Investment Commission and Treasury. Read more here.
Occasional lecture
The state of the road was such “as to be a disgrace to the responsible city officers”: Immunity for nonfeasance for repair of roads and its challenges to the imperial legal order in the late nineteenth century
On Monday, 11 August 2025 in Court 13A, Law Courts Building, Professor Mark Lunney presented an occasional lecture titled ‘The state of the road was such “as to be a disgrace to the responsible city officers”: Immunity for misfeasance for repair of roads and its challenges to the imperial legal order in the late nineteenth century’.
Mark is an Adjunct Professor the School of Law at the University of New England, Armidale and a Professor at the Dickson Poon School of Law, King’s College London, and Junior Vice-President of the Forbes Society. He is a Visiting Professor at the Faculty of Laws, University College London: read bio
Origins of the UN Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods
On Tuesday 29 July 2025 in Court 13A, Law Courts Building, Inma Conde presented a legal history tutorial on the origins of the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods.
History of Equity
On Thursday, 10 July 2025 the Hon Joe Campbell KC presented a legal history tutorial in Court 13A on “The History of Equity.” The Hon J C Campbell KC was a judge of the Supreme Court of NSW from 2001 until his retirement in 2012. He sat in the Equity Division from 2001 to 2006, and was a judge of the Court of Appeal from 2007 to 2012. In 2013 he was elected as a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Law. In 2013 he became an Adjunct Professor at the University of Sydney Law School, teaching in the subjects of Equity and Legal Interpretation.
The Forbes Society is grateful to the Hon A S Bell, Chief Justice of NSW, for his continued kind permission to use Supreme Court facilities for tutorials.
The significance of Roman Law in the Western Legal Tradition
On Wednesday, 11 June 2025 at 5:15pm the Hon Arthur Emmett AO KC presented a legal history tutorial in Court 13A on “The significance of Roman Law in the Western Legal Tradition.” The Hon Arthur Emmett AO KC has taught Roman Law part time for more than 40 years at Sydney University, where he has been Challis Lecturer in Roman law since 1990. He has also taught Roman law as Adjunct Professor at the University of NSW. He is the author of Roman Law Under the Southern Cross – Sidere Ius Civile Mutato recently published by Federation Press.
In Search of Samuel Griffith
On Tuesday, 24 February 2025 the Hon Peter Applegarth AM KC, a former judge of the Supreme Court of Queensland, presented an Occasional Lecture in Banco Court, Level 13 Law Courts Building, 184 Phillip St Sydney titled ‘In Search of Samuel Griffith‘. The lecture was followed by a formal presentation to 2024 Essayists – see the Essay Competition page.
Wife Sales and Legal Responses in Colonial Australia
On Thursday 5 September 2024 Dr Henry Kha presented a legal history tutorial titled “Wife Sales and Legal Responses in Colonial Australia“
The History of Precedents
On Tuesday 13 August 2024, barrister Robert Turnbull presented a legal history tutorial in Court 13A titled “The History of Precedents”. Robert provided this outline:
- How did a legal system evolve from 12 to 15 judges sitting at Westminster Hall propounding principles of law for a population of 2 million, to a complex federal system with hundreds of judges sitting at various levels of appeal, in dialogue with judges from around the world?
- The history of precedent is bound up with two other institutional pillars: law reporting and appeals. How have those facets of legal history borne upon the development of the common law and the principles of equity?
Biography: Robert is a barrister at 8 Wentworth Chambers. He practices in commercial, public law, white collar crime and tax, as well as other areas. Robert was formerly a solicitor at Clayton Utz, and Slaughter and May. He last gave a Forbes Society tutorial in 2014, and delivered the Thirteenth Annual Forbes Lecture in that year.
Automating Empirical Legal Research
Dr Ben Chen presented a Legal History Tutorial on “Automating Empirical Legal Research” at the Law Society, Level 2, 170 Phillip Street on 6 May 2024. Ben spoke on empirical legal research which involves learning from a large number of judgments, legislative materials, or other documents. For example, legal historians may wish to investigate how hundreds or thousands of cases fitting some description have developed over several centuries. While empirical research can be rewarding, it can also be costly, time-consuming and mundane. Sydney Informatics Hub and Ben are developing a web-based program to reduce the cost of doing empirical research, using judgments as a test case. Called the Empirical Legal Research Kickstarter, this program seeks to make empirical research viable without a large budget and an army of research assistants.
Pilot versions of the Empirical Legal Research Kickstarter can automatically search for and download judgments of select Anglo-Australian jurisdictions. This program can also automatically produce common data formats with case-specific descriptions/features. For example, a spreadsheet with rows of judgments and columns of catchwords/keywords, hearing dates, decision, decision date and so on. Moreover, the program can instruct GPT — a generative AI — to do much of the menial work traditionally done by research assistants. Pilot versions of the program are available at:
- (NSW) https://empirical-legal-research.streamlit.app
- (CTH) https://cth-empirical-legal-research.streamlit.app
- (UK) https://uk-empirical-legal-research.streamlit.app
Biography: Ben Chen is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Sydney Law School, a Councillor of the Forbes Society, and a former Tipstaff to Justice Geoff Lindsay. Ben writes in the areas of equity and trusts, civil procedure, succession law, and game theory. He has published his research in leading academic journals based in Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. His works in legal history have been cited extra-judicially by judges of the New South Wales and Queensland Courts of Appeal. The Australian Research Council is currently funding his research on costs and delay in litigation over inheritance.
A brief history of licences over land: From contract to property and back again?
Lucas Clover Alcolea of the University of Otago Faculty of Law delivered a legal history tutorial on 18 March 2024 the topic ‘A brief history of licences over land: From contract to property and back again?’ The paper has since been published as ‘Contractual licences over land and the ‘disappearing divide between property and obligation’ — (2024) 54 Aust Bar Rev 319. Lucas gave this outline of his tutorial:
It has been stated “There is almost no aspect of the law relating to licences over land which has not, at some time or another, given rise to problems.” Although one might be tempted to lay much of the blame for this situation at the feet of Lord Denning’s (in)famous creativity from the 1950s to the 1980s, this would be a little unfair as licences over land have always “occupie[d] the uncharted borderland between contract and real property and [have therefore been] caught by conflicting terminologies and different ways of thinking.” This presentation will briefly outline the three stages of the law as regards contractual licences, orthodoxy which regarded licences as purely personal rights, Denning who transformed certain licences into proprietary or quasi-proprietary rights, and the ‘return to orthodoxy’, before noting that they have continued to experience significant remedial growth even in their new orthodox era.
Thus, courts in England and Australasia have been willing to grant licensees relief from forfeiture, specific performance, injunctive relief, and the ability to bring trespass claims, despite the fact that these remedies were traditionally restricted to proprietary rights, specifically leases. After analysing these developments, the presentation will consider whether the post-Ashburn Anstalt distinction between granting proprietary relief for licences whilst insisting on their personal nature, and actually recognising them as proprietary, is a tenable one. Ultimately, it will be submitted that it is not ‘heretical’ to describe certain licences over land as, at least weakly, proprietary in certain circumstances and such a development is entirely in line with the ‘arc of [equitable] history’ given equity’s ‘reificatory’ tendency.
1 November 2023
The Slander of Women
On 1 November 2023 Dr Jessica Lake presented a tutorial The Slander of Women: Australia and the gendered reform of defamation in the 19thcentury common law world in Court 13A.
In the nineteenth century, a gendered reform movement known as the Slander of Women Acts swept through the common law world, making it easier for women to sue for defamatory allegations of sexual immorality. Under these changes, first initiated in New Jersey in 1790, a woman called a ‘whore’ or ‘unchaste’ could bring a civil action for slander without the burden of proving ‘special damage’. These reforms, while technical in language, reflected important shifts in understanding about gender, social status and speech and carried significant social and cultural implications. At one level, they enabled individual women to vindicate their reputations, obtain financial compensation and silence vituperative attacks. More broadly, the Slander of Women laws overturned centuries of English precedent – structured around class hierarchies, shaped to address men’s injuries, and premised on distinctions between common law and ecclesiastical courts. In the USA, these reforms connected with revolutionary sentiments, an emphasis on ‘character’ and a paternalistic desire to ‘protect’ the purity of republican wives and daughters. But what spurred the Australian colonies – New South Wales, South Australia, and Victoria in particular – to break with England on this issue? How did new significance of respectability, ideas of civilisation, and conditions of commerce influence the direction and development of defamation laws in these far-flung colonies? Drawing upon archival research funded in part by the Francis Forbes Society, this presentation will examine Australia’s place within this global reform movement
Biography: Jessica is a Senior Research and ARC DECRA Fellow in the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences at the Australian Catholic University in Melbourne. Her first book, The Face that Launched a Thousand Lawsuits: The American Women Who Forged a Right to Privacy, was published with Yale University Press in 2016. Her second book on the transnational and gendered history of defamation law is forthcoming with Stanford University Press.
24 October 2023
The work of magistrates in early colonial New South Wales
Megan Cameron (University of Sydney Law School) whose research is supported by a 2022 Forbes Fund grant, presented a legal history tutorial on The work of magistrates in early colonial New South Wales, in Court 13A on 24 October 2023.
Megan is a PhD candidate at the University of Sydney Law School. Her thesis is about the magistrates of the early New South Wales colony (1800-1835). Megan is examining the powers given (and taken) by magistrates, and their interaction with three convict rebellions. Those rebellions are the Vinegar Hill rebellion of 1804, the Ribbon Boy rebellion of 1830, and the Castle Forbes uprising of 1834. In examining those three rebellions, Megan will show how magistrates had both power which was given to them (through their commission of the peace, and their oath of office), and power which they took (powers derived from statute, and from the personal gravitas of each magistrate). The work will show that magistrates had a substantial degree of personal power, which they exercised particularly in relation to convicts in the early colonial period.
15 August 2023
The South Australian Frontier and its Legacies: a truth telling project
Legal history tutorial by Skye Krichauff of the University of Adelaide: The South Australian Frontier and its Legacies: a truth telling project, chaired by Dr Ben Chen. Skye is working with Associate Professor Robert Foster, whose project ‘Reconciling the Frontier’ received support from the Forbes Fund in 2022.
Abstract: Skye Krichauff is a primary researcher for an Australian Research Council project that maps the extent and nature of conflict between Aboriginal people and colonists on the South Australian frontier (c. 1836 to 1900). The project emerges out of the Uluru Statement from the Heart‘s call to engage in ‘truth-telling about our history’. In addition to examining archival sources, Skye has been working with Aboriginal communities and recording both Aboriginal people’s and settler descendants’ oral histories. The information gathered is compiled in a software platform called ‘Story Maps’ which allows the project team to incorporate multimedia forms of visualisation (electronic documents, charts and graphs, images, audio and video recordings). During this presentation, Skye will outline the aims, methodology and findings of the project, and demonstrate the features and workability of the story map.
24 July 2023
Australia’s Constitution and her British Ties
Dane Luo, Associate to the Hon Justice Hammerschlag, Chief Judge in Equity delivered a a fascinating paper titled: Australia’s Constitution and her British Ties at a legal history tutorial on 24 July 2023.
24 May 2023
The effect of the American Civil War on the law of contract
by Michael Adams, a PhD candidate at Columbia Law School and the current Counsel Assisting the NSW Solicitor General
18 April 2023
Art and the Law: The Archibald Prize case of 1944 and beyond
by Dr Peter Edwell and the Hon Keith Mason AC KC
When the dispute over the award of the Archibald Prize to William Dobell went to the Supreme Court of NSW in 1944 it made headlines around Australia. With Garfield Barwick as counsel for the relators and Frank Kitto acting for the respondents, the legal arguments and tactics employed in the case took centre stage in one of Australia’s most famous court dramas. Behind the scenes, art and the law were strongly connected with the influential figure of Lionel Lindsay playing an important role in the case and possessing strong links with business, political and legal powerbrokers, especially Chief Justice Frederick Jordan. This lecture investigates some key aspects of the case and the influences at play on Barwick and Kitto. It also examines connections between Lionel Lindsay and Chief Justice Jordan together with the controversy behind the creation of Mary Edwards’ portrait of Jordan that hangs in the Banco Court today.
Keith Mason served as Solicitor-General of New South Wales (1987-1997) and President of the NSW Court of Appeal (1997-2008). In 2019 he published the first biographical study of Chief Justice Frederick Jordan (Sir Frederick Jordan: Fire under the Frost) and has published other material on Jordan and his connections to the art world in the 1940s.
Peter Edwell is Senior Lecturer in the Department of History and Archaeology at Macquarie University. His most recent book, The Case that Stopped a Nation: The Archibald Prize controversy of 1944, deals with the controversy surrounding the award of the Archibald Prize to William Dobell for his portrait of fellow-artist Joshua Smith. It is the first detailed study of the controversy and court case and was short-listed for the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards in 2022.
11 April 2023
An Historical Constitutional Approach and the General (Non-statutory) Executive Power of the Commonwealth – History as Method: ‘Ancient’ Solutions to Current Problems
Professor Peter Gerangelos AM (Professor of Constitutional Law at Sydney Law School)
6 March 2023
The curious history of the nationhood power
The first legal history tutorial for 2023 was delivered on Monday 6 March 2023 by Professor Emerita, Anne Twomey, Professor of Constitutional Law and Director of the Constitutional Reform Unit at Sydney Law School.
Professor Twomey provided the following outline:
Hidden away in the round tower of Windsor Castle is a letter from Sir Isaac Isaacs to the King about one of the greatest constitutional crises that Australia had yet seen – the dismissal of the Lang Government. It contains the first strands of what would come to be a nationhood power to deal with national emergencies. This tutorial will trace the historical development of the nationhood power, with a particular focus on the pivotal judgment of Sir Anthony Mason in the AAP case, and its role in the COVID-19 pandemic as a power to deal with emergencies.
2022 Tutorials
The first Forbes Society tutorial of 2022 was presented by Dr Coel Kirkby of the University of Sydney, on Wednesday 23 February 2022 at 5.15pm in Banco Court on the “History of Jurisprudence”. It was followed by a formal presentation by the President of the Forbes Society, Chief Justice Allsop of the Federal Court of Australia, to the Honourable T F Bathurst AC, Chief Justice of New South Wales, recognizing his support for the Society during his term as Chief Justice, on his retirement from the Court.
Declan Noble delivered a legal history tutorial on “A partial history of the Public Law Injunction in Australia” on Tuesday 22 November 2022 at 5.15pm in Court 13A, Law Courts Building, Queens Square, 184 Phillip St Sydney. Declan was then Associate to the Hon Justice Jeremy Kirk in the NSW Court of Appeal. In 2021, he was tipstaff to the Hon Justice Richard White, also in the New South Wales Court of Appeal. He completed a Bachelor Arts in Classics (Hons I) and a Bachelor of Laws (Hons I) at the University of Sydney. His LLB Honours thesis, titled “The Section 75(v) Injunction: History and Principles”, examines the development in Australia of the public law injunction over the course of the 20th century, especially in constitutional contexts. It was published in the Australian Law Journal in January 2023.
Dr Henry Kha (Senior Lecturer, Macquarie Law School) delivered a legal history tutorial on Tuesday 27 September 2022 titled ‘Unification of Australian Divorce Law under the Matrimonial Causes Act 1959’. Synopsis: The enactment of the Matrimonial Causes Act 1959 (Cth) was a significant moment in the history of Australian family law. The Act unified the divorce law under a single federal statute. It is argued that the introduction of the Act was driven based on modern conservatism. The Act promoted the social conservatism that was prevalent during the Menzies era of the 1950s by preserving many of the existing grounds for divorce and barring divorce to married couples in the first three 3 years of marriage. On the other hand, it was a legal change driven by modernity and the unification of Australian divorce law was part of the project of nation building. Moreover, the Act introduced separation of five 5 years as a no-fault ground of divorce. This eventually paved the way for the introduction of no-fault divorce in Australia under the Family Law Act 1975 (Cth). The tutorial explored the legal and political changes that led to this divorce law reform.
