What Real Justice Means: Larissa Behrendt Looks Beyond the Courtroom

What real justice means is the question Larissa Behrendt has spent a career circling — in courtrooms, in lecture halls, on Country. Her new book, Finding Justice: From Courtroom to Country, released in early November 2026, pulls that work together. The publisher, University of Queensland Press, describes it as part philosophical meditation and part historical reckoning, weaving personal reflection, Indigenous knowledge and decades of legal experience (UQP). Information verified through 12 November 2026.

Behrendt is a Eualayai/Gamillaroi woman, a Distinguished Professor and Laureate Fellow at the Jumbunna Institute of Indigenous Education and Research at the University of Technology Sydney (National Indigenous Times, via Style Up). Her starting claim is disarmingly simple: more than one way of understanding law, justice and responsibility has always existed in Australia (UQP). Everything else in the book follows from refusing to treat the imported system as the only one in the room.

The book’s structure, listed by Perlego, signals the arc: “The Architecture of Power,” then “Practices of Sovereignty,” closing with “What Endures” (Perlego).

A system that has never acknowledged its complicity

Behrendt’s diagnosis, given in an interview with National Indigenous Times on the book’s release, runs along two threads. The first is law as an instrument of colonisation — used, in her words, “as a tool of colonisation to justify dispossession, to give powers over control of bodies, removal of children” (National Indigenous Times, via Style Up). The structure built to do those things, she argues, was never dismantled: “we’ve never had a moment where the legal system has acknowledged its complicity,” and the over-representation of First Nations people in out-of-home care and in prisons is the continuing evidence.

The second thread sits in the Constitution itself. Its framers, she says, made a deliberate choice in 1901 to leave room for racially discriminatory legislation, and the 1967 referendum did not remove that assumption. The main shield since then, the Racial Discrimination Act of 1975, is ordinary legislation — parliament can override or repeal what parliament passed, and she points to the Howard era as proof of how fragile that protection is (National Indigenous Times, via Style Up).

Her conclusion is deliberately uncomfortable. Quoting Elder and historian Uncle Gary Foley — “We have never had so many First Nations lawyers, but we have never had so many people in prison” — she argues the system is not failing at its purpose but revealing it: it is “working as it is intended to,” and adding more First Nations faces inside it does not change the underlying power dynamics (National Indigenous Times, via Style Up).

Indigenous approaches to justice start from interconnectedness

Against that diagnosis, the book sets a different philosophy. At the centre of First Nations worldviews, Behrendt says, sits interconnectedness — the philosophy inside kinship and totemic systems. “It’s not just ‘we’re all connected’,” she explains. Connection to Kin or to Country “comes with active obligations” (National Indigenous Times, via Style Up).

That single move — connection as obligation, not sentiment — reorganises the whole idea of justice. The publisher’s summary notes that the book examines First Nations’ Practices of Sovereignty grounded in self-determination, reciprocity and collective care, and how those practices have succeeded within communities (UQP). Justice, on this account, is not a contest with a winner. Behrendt contrasts the western courtroom’s “‘us and them’ or a ‘win-lose’ plaintiff v defendant” setup with a holistic approach that “really can’t be achieved just through a court system” and instead makes space for people to tell their stories and be supported through healing (National Indigenous Times, via Style Up).

What real justice means when a verdict is not repair

Here is the philosophical pressure point. Western justice, Behrendt says, “assumes you can go to court and get a verdict and somehow that repairs what you’ve been through.” She rejects the assumption outright: a verdict cannot repair intergenerational trauma, or the trauma of being a victim of crime, or address the conditions that brought someone into contact with the criminal justice system in the first place (National Indigenous Times, via Style Up).

That is not an argument against courts. It is an argument about what a verdict is — a determination, not a mending. Law and lore can co-exist, as the publisher’s framing puts it (UQP), but only if the older system is allowed to lead somewhere. Behrendt’s practical proposal is to “create more spaces where First Nations approaches to justice can be the leading way,” pointing to justice reinvestment and community-based responses, with first responders rather than police as the default presence, as spaces already being carved out by First Nations advocacy (National Indigenous Times, via Style Up).

She is clear-eyed about the politics. After the Voice referendum, she says, appetite for constitutional change will be scarce for some time — pushing the work towards community practice rather than tinkering at the edges (National Indigenous Times, via Style Up).

Justice as interconnectedness reaches past the courtroom

Behrendt refuses to keep the philosophy in its legal box. Interconnection, she argues, offers a road map for the climate challenge and for a polarised society, because “Indigenous world views around interconnection are the absolute antithesis of a polarised society” (National Indigenous Times, via Style Up). Her challenge is pointed: “We are the world’s oldest continuous living culture. Why aren’t people more curious about how we achieved that?”

Analysis: the book’s provocation is a reversal of the burden of proof. Debate usually asks Indigenous ideas to justify themselves inside western categories — rights, recognition, remedy. Behrendt asks the opposite: what does a legal tradition that has run for tens of thousands of years, on the same ground, know about obligation and repair that a two-century-old import does not? A system measured by verdicts will keep producing verdicts. One measured by restored relationships would count different things — and counting different things is where philosophies stop being decorative and start changing institutions.

Photo: Joshua Tagicakibau, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Sources

1. https://styleupnit.com.au/09-11-2026/27431/finding-justice-larissa-behrendts-new-book-explores-what-real-justice-means-and-what-it-might-yet-become
2. https://www.uqp.com.au/books/finding-justice
3. https://www.perlego.com/book/5680117/finding-justice-from-courtroom-to-country-pdf