Authority to Decide

To realise that there is no Court in Australia with unlimited jurisdiction is at one stroke to recognise the continuing importance of Justice Leeming’s standard work, and the relevance of this second edition. The ‘autochthonous expedient’, as Sir Owen Dixon named it, has much to answer for: it leads inexorably to a bifurcated system of state and federal courts, which has many toils and snares for the unwary. To compound the problem, the state courts enjoy a large amount of ‘invested’ federal jurisdiction, which means that on many occasions they exercise it without appreciating the fact that they have done so.