Rural/Regional Law and Justice in Australia

I've not been blogging much for the past few weeks because I was in Australia to give a couple of lectures regarding my work on law and rural livelihoods. One of my talks was in Warrnambool, western Victoria, for the Rural/Regional Law and Justice Conference hosted by Deakin University, 19-21 November. I was a key note speaker, along with Professor Daniela Stehlik, Director of the Northern Institute of Charles Darwin University in the Northern Territory, and Alex Ward, President of the Law Council of Australia. The organizer of the event was Richard Coverdale, a lecturer in law at Deakin (which has campuses in Geelong, Melbourne, and Warrnambool). He has written a very interesting paper called Postcode Justice (about variations in access to justice from place to place and particularly along the rural-urban continuum), which he presented at the event. The conference included several dozen papers categorized according to three threads: Legal Practice, Social Justice, and Legal Service Systems.

I'll be writing more over the next few weeks about what I learned regarding law and justice in rural Australia and, more particularly, academic and policy attention to these issues in the Australian context. For now, here is a link to a press release issued by Deakin University in the wake of the event.