Australian Critical Decisions: Remembering Koowarta and Tasmanian Dams

The 1980s was a time of significant social, political and cultural change. In Australia, the law was pivotal to these changes. The two High Court cases that this book explores – Koowarta v Bjelke-Petersen (1982) and the Tasmanian Dams case (1983) – are famous legally as they marked a decisive reckoning by the Court with both international law and federal constitutionalism. Yet these cases also offer a significant marker of Australia in the 1980s: a shift to a different form of political eng...