Dreamtime and the Common Law

Teaching the law focuses on authoritative legal texts that create, modify, and end the rights of individuals or institutions. Authoritative texts include contracts, judgments, and statutes. The law structures and regulates the world through its textual power and the force of the state. Indigenous epistemologies are living systems that are sustained over generations, and often form part of its cultural or spiritual identity. In teaching law, we both seek to disrupt the way in which extensive focus on text can obscure the ability to see the impact of the ongoing assertion of colonial power through the perpetuation of the common law. We illustrate how engaging with visual materials in the classroom enables a space to critically engage with the text of the law and law of the text.