Legal Émigrés and the Development of Australian Tort Law

Abstract

The intellectual history of Australian private law remains largely unwritten because Australia was seen as merely following the law as laid down in England. This article challenges the traditional paradigm by considering the influence of a number of legal émigrés who came to Australia immediately after the Second World War. Concentrating on the law of tort, the article considers how two of these émigrés - Wolfgang Friedmann at The University of Melbourne and John Fleming at Canberra University College - were at the forefront of a new breed of tort scholarship, not based on English traditions, that contributed to the increasing intellectualisation of the Australian legal academy.