Dreaming on Indigenous Legal Education

Dreaming on Indigenous Legal Education was a public lecture and the first event in the Reckoning and Reimagining workshop program. On Thursday 21 August we gathered with leading experts to imagine legal education grounded in Indigenous authority and transformative approaches beyond colonial constraints.

The Indigenous Law and Justice Hub presented Dreaming on Indigenous Legal Education on Thursday 21 August 2025 at the Melbourne Law School.

The event brought together renowned experts to dream expansively about what they think a legal education grounded in First Nations ways of knowing, being and doing and legal authority would look like in Australia.

Esteemed panel members:

  • Dr Carwyn Jones
  • Jidah Clark – Chair of the Victorian Treaty Authority
  • Professor Eddie Cubillo – Director of the Mabo Centre

About the Event

Australian legal education is characterised by stasis, with core education requirements for admission as an Australian legal practitioner effectively unchanged since their introduction (Kift and Nakano, 2021). Work aiming to shift legal practice away from colonial foundations and towards Indigenous justice goals so often finds itself characterised by intense negotiation and compromise.

This exercise in freedom dreaming takes inspiration from the work of Black American historian Robin D G Kelley, who writes: ‘love and imagination may be the most revolutionary impulses available to us, and yet we have failed to understand their political importance and respect them as powerful social forces’ (Kelley, 2002).

In this event, we encouraged audiences to reckon with a commitment to settler futurity in higher education institutions (Tuck and Gaztambide-Fernández, 2013), and imagine an Indigenous legal education grounded in Indigenous rather than state legal authority. The panel considered the role of education practices in resurgence of Indigenous legal traditions, building treaty relations in Victoria and fostering a broader justice orientation across the community, followed by facilitated discussion.