Legal Education

Principles of Yolngu Traditional Law Document

In the area of legal education, ARDS has been working in assisting Indigenous people with legal difficulties and attempting to dispel some of the misconceptions about the legal system. Many of these misconceptions occur due to the use of complex legal language, which often cause a major difficulty for indigineous people who have english as a second or even tenth language.

An example of one of these misconceptions is the term "Guilty". In conversations with lawyers, many Indigenous people hear lawyers saying, "if you just plead guilty, you'll get through real quick." This has caused a misconception about the term "Guilty" meaning to "get through real quick". Such misconceptions can have disastrous consequences for Indigineous people and we are constantly striving to give Indigenous people a real understanding of the way the legal system works, comparing the system to their own traditional law.

ARDS have a close working relationship with the Aboriginal Interpreter Service (AIS) and we have recently begun to provide formal mentoring for interpreters working at courts in Darwin.

This research report looked at 30 commonly used English legal words or concepts and quantified how well or poorly those words were understood by the Yolŋu participants. Conclusions were drawn about:

1. levels of miscommunication between Yolŋu court-users and English-first-language speakers (magistrates, lawyers, police and court staff) working within the criminal justice system,
2. misunderstandings and ‘knowledge gaps’ experienced by Yolŋu court-users, and
3. levels of legal literacy amongst Yolŋu court-users.

The research overwhelmingly demonstrated a massive communication gulf operating between Yolŋu and non-Indigenous legal personnel. The most damning finding was that the problem is still regularly unidentified or unacknowledged.

Download this report for free.