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Negotiation And Native Title: Why Common Law Courts Are Not Proper Fora For Determining Native Land Title Issues, Geoffrey R. Schiveley

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

The displacement of indigenous populations is an obvious but often-overlooked consequence of worldwide European colonization. Until relatively recently, the rights of these groups have consistently been held to lower standards of protection than those of their colonizing counterparts, partly through the use of doctrines such as terra nullius. While earlier decades established the groundwork for recognition of these rights, in the 1990s native rights issues became of greater importance to both the international community and individual nations. Some of this heightened interest can be attributed to a series of high-profile common law court cases that provided native populations with favorable …