The centenary of the first sitting of the High Court of Australia was celebrated in the same courtroom in Melbourne in October 2003. There followed a conference in Canberra reviewing the decisions of the Court over the course of a century. The papers of that conference will shortly be published for a legal audience.
In advance of that book, CUP has published sixteen essays to give a more general audience an idea of the role the High Court has performed in the leading issues in which it has been involved. The writers are assigned important decisions or major themes. They explain the background. They describe proceedings in the High Court and (whilst it lasted) the Privy Council. They put their subjects in context and evaluate their significance in terms accessible to an informed lay reader. This book contains plenty of new insights that combine to make it a commemorative volume, but without many of the defects normal in that genre.
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