Selden Society lecture series Australia
Join a variety of judicial officers, legal professionals and academics for this informative and provocative series of legal history lectures. Each episode presents a single story uncovering a unique aspect of our common law past. This might be literature or language, a fascinating event or item, a significant person, or the development of a legal idea. These lectures are recorded in the Banco Court, Brisbane, and are now available to the world.
Selden Society lecture series Australia
Latest Episodes
The last appeal from Queensland to the Privy Council
Prior to the enactment of the Australia Act 1986 (Cth) and the Australia Act 1986 (UK), some Queensland court matters were appealed to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council for final determination. What were hearings lik...
'Reds under the bed'—75 years since the Communist Party case
The Communist Party case is one of the High Court’s most important decisions. In a high-profile legal battle, the argument before the Court pitted a future Chief Justice of Australia, Garfield Barwick KC, against the then Leader of the Oppositi...
The origins of contemporary judicial power in Papua New Guinea
On the night of 19 June 1904, Christopher Stansfeld Robinson—the first Australian chief judicial officer in what became the Territory of Papua—died by suicide outside Government House in Port Moresby.Behind this tragedy lay earlier trage...
50 years of the Family Law Act
This lecture explains broadly the fundamental changes to divorce and matrimonial causes law introduced by the Family Law Act in 1975. It also demonstrates how the many changes to the Act over the past 50 years have transformed family law as muc...
Recasting the law on a more merciful basis: juvenile justice then and now
The first Selden Society lecture for 2025, Recasting the law on a more merciful basis: juvenile justice then and now, will be presented by Dr Robyn Blewer from the Griffith Law School.In 1897, a Perth newspaper reported on the d...
