Decolonising civil procedure: Court process as continuing colonisation and tool for indigenous justice

Civil procedure (the rules on how a legal dispute is managed or proceeds through a court system) is often understood as a technical and practical subject devoid of politics or prejudice. In this chapter, I highlight how this seemingly dry and apolitical compulsory law course can be used to expose processes of continuing colonisation and explore the role of colonial processes in fights for Indigenous justice. Yet these changes that I have made to the civil procedure curriculum at Australian National University can only be considered ‘decolonial’ in a restricted sense. I argue there is a limit to what individual scholars can do to decolonise civil procedure pedagogy. Continuing on a decolonisation journey requires structural changes to the regulation of law degrees in Australia and a commitment to legal pluralism by way of teaching both colonial and Indigenous forms of dispute resolution on their own terms. I conclude by observing that this crucial objective nevertheless creates an ethical conundrum for civil procedure teachers operating in the existing regulatory context.