Daniel Lavery

Daniel graduated Arts/Law from the University of Queensland and began his legal career with the Department of Justice. He then investigated deaths for the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody in both Queensland and the Northern Territory before pursuing postgraduate studies on indigenous legal issues at the University of Ottawa in Canada.

While studying in Ottawa, he conducted the inaugural study of Indigenous Australians and the law school experience which resulted in a national network of successful pre-law programs for Indigenous students entering upon legal studies.  This was published in the Legal Education Review in 1993 as 'The Participation of Indigenous Australians in Legal Education'.

He returned to work throughout northern Australia on native title/infrastructure issues as a lawyer and negotiator while completing a PhD on indigenous sovereignties re-emerging in the Australian jural landscape in the native title era.  He argued that the recognition of native title in each of the 500+ positive determinations of native title in the post-Native Title Act era is an affirmation and re-emergence of the allodial sovereignties that existed prior to British colonisation.

Dr Lavery is a leading authority on the legal position of Australia's Indigenous peoples in the pre-Constitutional colonial framework. He has published widely including, most recently:

- (2023) Native Title as Property: Yunupingu v Commonwealth, James Cook University Law Review, 29, 125

- (2022) Renovating the Orthodox Theory of Australian Territorial Sovereignty, University of New South Wales Law Journal, 45 (2) 499

- (2020) Judicial Distancing in the High Court: Love/Thoms v Commonwealth, James Cook University Law Review, 26, 159

- (2019) No Decorous Veil: the continuing reliance on an enlarged terra nullius notion in Mabo [No 2], Melbourne University Law Review, 43 (1) 233

Daniel has a forthcoming publication, The Killing of Charlie, focussing on an Indigenous death in custody in remote Cape York Peninsula.