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23 Griffith L. Rev. 1 (2014)

handle is hein.journals/griffith23 and id is 1 raw text is: Griffith Law Review, 2014 IZ Routledge Vol. 23, No. 1, 1-15, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10383441.2014.944002 FO lor&FransGrup Critical decision, 1982: remembering Koowarta v Bjelke-Petersen Ann Genovese* Melbourne Law School, Australia This article introduces the writings of jurists, lawyers, scholars and activists who were invited to review and remember the 1982 High Court decision Koowarta v Bjelke-Petersen ('Koowarta'). The judgment is important doctrinally and is often cited on the legal record. What is less familiar is how Koowarta is also a public trial, an event of law that carries many different accounts of how jurisprudence is experienced in the life of a community. This introduction situates Koowarta as a public trial, and examines the ways in which the articles in this special issue of Griffith Law Review contribute to this account of jurisprudence. In doing so, it argues that there is necessity and purpose in making visible the histories of an Australian jurisprudence as Australian, and that histories of place are not extricable from our histories of living with law. The article also argues that paying attention to the forms and methods of the writing of the history of jurisprudence - described here as 'jurisography' - is an important part of this activity. Introduction This special issue of Griffith Law Review commemorates the thirtieth anniversary of the trial, judgment and public life of the 1982 High Court decision Koowarta v Bjelke-Petersen ('Koowarta'). In doing so, it celebrates the writings of jurists, lawyers, scholars and activists who were invited to review and remember Koowarta as a turning point in Australian jurisprudence at a symposium held at the Melbourne Law School in May 2012. The purpose of the symposium was to address Koowarta not only as a signal constitutional moment in our recent past, but also to make it visible as a trial or an adjudicated hearing. All trials staged in a courtroom are stories of contested experiences of law told in the languages and through the techniques of law. What they produce - in the reported decision, the citation - becomes a story that authorises the law of a place. This story is familiar to those of us who bear responsibility for the conduct of law in Australia. What is less familiar is how that trial is also a public trial, an event of law that carries many different accounts of how jurisprudence is experienced in the life of a community. To describe and show a trial as a public trial is to remind a community that law is situated and is the occasion for the events through which a 'nomos' comes into being. This is *Email: a.genovese@unimelb.edu.au 'Koowarta v Bjelke-Petersen (1982) 153 CLR 168. 21 refer here, of course, to Cover (1995), pp 95-172. ( 2014 Griffith University