Mary Spiers Williams offers the reader a provocative invitation to reflect on the centring of State law and to critically engage with its impact on First Peoples and more broadly its facilitation of dispossession and its structural bias against First Peoples in Australia. She asks readers to reconsider the nature and authority of law and legal systems transplanted to effect colonisation. Focussing on Australian criminal law, she challenges assumptions about its lawfulness and just–ness, and insists that the reader see its inherent violence against Indigenous people, ways of being and law. This provocative and uncomfortable essay endeavours to create the possibility that readers will gain some insight into Aboriginal Peoples’ perspectives. It does so first by sharing stories of First Peoples experience of state law and their practice of their own law. It also does so by offering another way of understanding what is lawful. Williams asks readers to consider what it might mean to shift their perspectives: what might happen if we assumed that all law derives from Country, not from courts or legislators? and that lawful behaviour, at minimum, requires us to recognise that everyone and everything is interrelated? At base it would require the state to stop claiming the primacy of its law, and to recognise instead, that, in Australia, two laws (First and State) exist under, and are subject to, one law (derived from Country).

Born of a critical moment in Australia’s social and political history, the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976 is a vestige of earlier attempts to grapple with Aboriginal rights and restitution. The Act has led to the restitution of large stretches of land and coastal areas in the Northern Territory and has a history of implementation in a relatively consistent policy setting. For many Aboriginal groups, the era of seeking rights under the ALRA has transformed into one of self-management of Country and the seeking of economic and cultural futures for younger generations of Aboriginal landowners. For the first group to lodge a claim under the Act in 1976, the Yanyuwa (and including Binbingka, Garrwa and Mara claimants) in the southwest Gulf of Carpentaria, their story now stretches over four decades. This chapter accounts for existing Indigenous Laws in relation to lands and waters in the Gulf of Carpentaria, norther Australia. These Laws co-exist with white Australian law and have found themselves entangled in the context of an Aboriginal Land Claim. Yanyuwa culture and Law have not been obliterated by legislative land rights nor the legal fight it entails. In fact, many aspects of Law and culture have been assured through the act of generational knowledge transfer that is demanded as an evidentiary mandate, and due to the intense scrutiny of knowledge that must be displayed during the process of land claim hearings.

In a legally and politically pluralistic world, multiple actors often claim authority over the same spaces or subjects. Democratic theory must therefore find democratic ways for various actors to coordinate, negotiate, and contest their respective authority claims. Some such practices are well established. Sometimes, actors choose to divide authority between them, as in federal arrangements. In other cases, they engage in shared decision-making, as in consociation systems. This chapter focuses on a less studied set of practices termed ‘conditional authority’. When actors engage in practices of conditional authority, each party accepts and accommodates the independent authority of the other, but only subject to certain conditions. Such practices allow parties to negotiate the boundaries of their respective claims and manage conflict without requiring either a division of authority (federalism) or the presence of co-decision mechanisms (consociationalism). Drawing on examples from the European Union and the relationship between Canada and Indigenous peoples, this chapter argues that practices of conditional authority represent an important and novel form of pluralist praxis.

This chapter engages with the contributions of Indigenous peoples in North America to a jurisprudence of entanglement, as expressed through historic treaties between colonists and Indigenous peoples. A prevalent contemporary view understands treaties as a form of negotiated co-existence in which, contract-like, different parties agree to exchange – or share – land, resources and jurisdiction. Treaties could thus be seen to provide interface norms for two legal orders, otherwise strangers to each other, which might now become entangled. However, a body of Indigenous scholarship on the resurgent treaty tradition shows up the liberal philosophical premises embedded in this understanding of legal pluralism and the entanglement of norms. Instead, from this perspective, treaties are a recognition that we are always and already in relationship. Further, the key tenets of that principle are that relationships themselves emerge from the more primal way our lifeworld is made up of symbiotic ecosystems. Entanglement in the context of treaties is thus a phenomenon of a different order than conventional legal pluralism: it is simply characteristic of an ontology of which law is a part. The larger implications of this for an ecologically grounded law are explored in conversation with occidental philosophies of entanglement.