Principal speaker
Associate Professor Jonathan Crowe
The academic discussion surrounding constitutional implications in Australia tends to have a sceptical tenor. This scepticism partly reflects a focus on what I will call (for want of a better term) specific implications: that is, implications drawn from a particular word or phrase in the constitutional text. The High Court of Australia has encouraged this emphasis by the way it has framed some of its more contested implications.
This paper takes a different approach. Its focus falls not on specific implications, as defined above, but on what I call holistic implications: that is, implications founded on the constitutional text as a whole. The idea is that the existence of the constitutional text implicates a range of factual and normative assumptions that inform the way the Constitution is interpreted and applied. I suggest that these kinds of holistic implications provide a more plausible basis for the High Court's jurisprudence than the kinds of specific implications that form the focus of the existing literature. I develop this argument by way of an analogy between constitutions, on the one hand, and factual or fictional narratives, on the other.
Jonathan Crowe is an Associate Professor in the T C Beirne School of Law at The University of Queensland and the current President of the Australian Society of Legal Philosophy. From 1 May 2016, he will be Professor of Law at Bond University. He has published widely on the relationship between law and ethics, including articles in the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, the Modern Law Review, Law and Critique, the Melbourne University Law Review, the Sydney Law Review, the Federal Law Review and the Australian Journal of Legal Philosophy.
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- Narelle Yarrow
- (07) 3735 5408