The Political Enterprise of Theory and Education within Australia’s Discipline of Law

Abstract

This thesis explains how three prominent legal scholars, each professors of legal theory, responded to surrounding political conditions to strengthen the discipline of law in Australia. It investigates the careers of Professor Peter Brett, who held the Chair of Jurisprudence at the University of Melbourne, Professor Alice Erh-Soon Tay, who held the Chair of Jurisprudence at the University of Melbourne, and Professor Geoffrey Sawer, who headed the Department of Law in the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University. As fully explained in the body of this thesis, these three scholars were selected because the positions they held and their theoretical dispositions made them obvious candidates for achieving change in the way that law was conceptualised, taught and studied within Australian universities. A central question addressed in this thesis is whether they ought to be considered pioneers and, if so, on what basis. This thesis also considers whether any of these scholars failed to capitalise on the opportunities afforded to them and whether such failures might explain why the discipline moved in one direction rather than another. By answering these questions this thesis provides a richer and deeper understanding of the way in which the discipline of law has evolved in Australia in the second half of the 20th century. This thesis argues that each of these legal scholars made novel and distinctively Australian contributions to legal theory, legal education, law school management and the community that ought to be recognised as part of broader thinking about the history of the discipline. In so doing it exposes the reductionist tendencies found in other histories of the discipline. By combining life histories of three legal scholars with broader contemplation of the discipline of law within Australia, it makes a new and novel contribution to the understanding of the founding of modern university legal education and scholarship within Australia.