Conference theme:

‘Oral sources and non-traditional legal sources’

Legal historians have traditionally looked to cases, statutes, and juristic literature. Yet the history of law has never been confined to such conventional legal sources. The use of oral sources and non-traditional materials raise important methodological questions for legal historians: what counts as a legal source? and how might law and history be written differently?

The 2026 conference theme invites consideration of oral sources and non-traditional legal sources, in every sense, in the context of law and history. Some conference streams will focus specifically on oral sources, including oral testimony, oral history, memory, storytelling, folklore, and intergenerational transmission. The theme invites participants to reconsider the sources of law and history.

Oral sources are especially important for histories of Indigenous law. We invite papers on tikanga Māori, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander customary law, and practices grounded in kinship, place, obligation, authority, and procedure. Such work may examine how colonial legal systems have misunderstood, appropriated, suppressed, or transformed Indigenous legal knowledge.

The conference also invites engagement with non-traditional legal sources more broadly, including newspapers, petitions, letters, council decisions, archival records, folklore, family histories, demographic material, and socio-economic data. Newspapers, for example, were forums in which trials were reported, in which the reputations of parties could be sensationalised, and by which communities could engage with the law. In essence, newspapers and other non-traditional sources can illuminate how law was experienced in everyday life.

This conference invites participants to explore oral and non-traditional legal sources. Themes may include: the challenges of using oral and non-traditional sources; customary law; the relationship between memory and the law; and the role of non-traditional sources to explore law and society.

This conference is a co-hosted event supported by Monash University and the University of Canterbury.

Contact the host of 45th annual Australian and New Zealand Law and History Society conference

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