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38 Law & Hist. Rev. 631 (2020)
The Limits of the Law in Claiming Rights to Land in a Settler Colony: South Australia in the Early-to-Mid Nineteenth Century

handle is hein.journals/lawhst38 and id is 663 raw text is: The Limits of the Law in Claiming Rights to Land in a Settler Colony: South Australia in the Early-to-Mid Nineteenth Century BAIN ATTWOOD In the closing decades of the twentieth century, as indigenous peoples in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand increasingly filed legal suits to regain their lands or win compensation for lands that they had lost, scholars increasingly devoted themselves to the task of explaining the ways in which European powers had laid claim to indigenous people's territories across the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. Their research invariably emphasized the role of the law. This was true not only of legal scholars but of intellectual and cultural historians as well. For example, Patricia Seed asserted that the law was central to all European claims of possession in the New World, because it was the means by which states created their legitimacy. Most of these scholars argued that particular legal doctrines that were formulated in metropolitan Europe dictated the terms on which imperial powers claimed indigenous people's lands at the peripheries. More particularly, it became common- place for these scholars to argue that a doctrine called terra nullius was especially important in this regard.' 1. Brian Slattery, The Land Rights of Indigenous Canadian Peoples (PhD diss., University of Oxford, 1979); Henry Reynolds, The Law of the Land (Melbourne: Penguin, 1987); Paul McHugh, The Maori Magna Carta: New Zealand Law and the Treaty of Waitangi (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Patricia Seed, Ceremonies of Possession in Europe's Conquest of the New World, 1492-1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 6; and Anthony Pagden, Law, Colonisation, Legitimisation, and the European Backgmund, in The Cambridge History of Law in America, Vol. 1, Early America (1500-1815), ed. Michael Grossberg and Christopher Tomlins (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 17-24. Bain Attwood is a professor of history at Monash University, Melbourne <bain. attwood@monash.edu>. He thanks the anonymous referees for their helpful reports and the Law and History Review editorial team for their wonderful guidance. Law and History Review November 2020, Vol. 38, No. 4 © the American Society for Legal History, Inc. 2020 dam in in1 X1 AL Xn nnmn22x

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