Samenvatting

Important legal developments are often credited to court decisions. This contribution will firstly discuss the Australian High Court decision in the Mabo case as such. The legal implications of a decision are often emphasised, instead of the actual persons who started the case, as Dutch sociological research has shown. The article will secondly state that in the Mabo case the person Eddy Mabo and his Aboriginal companions were a lot more important. Not that one has to solely think of him and his clansmen as political activists who go to court to change the legal order. The analysis will show that Eddie Mabo c.s. represent a legal culture in its own right. That legal culture has a far much longer history than the two centuries of Anglo-Australian common law. Mabo came to the fore as someone who was entitled by Aboriginal law to bear witness of Aboriginal law. The fact that an Aboriginal actor as such is the pure actuality of law is hardly recognised by the Anglo-Australian legal culture.