The Enduring Ideas of a Visionary

Gabriël A. Moens AM is Emeritus Professor of Law at the University of Queensland. Confined to his home office last year, he went through his dusty files. He found many papers and speeches, written in the 1990s and earlier, which have never been published. To our great profit he has collected twelve of these papers and published them as a book. He has also included three recent papers that deal with current topical issues.

These papers, placed in chronological order, dealing with issues that are still very much debated in Australia. For example, one of the acrimonious debates that took place in Australia from the 1960s to the 1980s involved the right of people to disobey laws. Although some academics argue that civil disobedience should always be non-violent, Professor Moens reminds us, in “On Civil Disobedience”, that there are instances of grave injustice which can be remedied only through non-peaceful means:

In general, civil disobedience becomes a societal problem when the…