In-person event

In the Voice Referendum, one major reason for voting No was the conviction among some Australians that the Australian people ought to be seen as single and undivided; for these Australians, the recognition of divisions within the polity would be inconsistent with the equal, democratically-grounded citizenship of all Australians.

In this seminar I explore the relationship between democracy and how one defines “the people”. A common approach suggests that “the people” ought to be defined only by the scope of the institutions themselves. On this view, for the purposes of democratic governance, the people are a purely institutional creation, formed by the rules that determine the boundaries of the state (“the institutionalist position”). A second common approach treats “the people” as formed exogenously. Peoples are defined pre-politically, typically in cultural terms. Those peoples possess the right to self-determination; they determine their own political structure (“the culturalist position”).

Each of these positions is over-simplified. I advance a “hybrid position”, which recognizes (in response to the culturalists) that there are often multiple potential definitions of the people, that “the people” is not purely pre-political, and that the value of democratic self-government can help us to weigh those potential definitions; and (in response to the institutionalists), that democratic self-government is inevitably shaped by cultural factors, and thus, for reasons internal to democratic theory, the structure of democratic institutions can legitimately include certain adaptations to those factors.

About the speaker

Jeremy Webber is Professor Emeritus of Law at the University of Victoria (Canada) and Professorial Fellow at the University of Melbourne. He has written widely in legal theory, constitutional theory, Indigenous rights, federalism, cultural diversity, and constitutional law in Canada and in relation to other countries (especially Australia).

Professor Webber began his career at McGill University (1987-1998), was Dean of Law at the University of Sydney (1998-2002), then Canada Research Chair in Law and Society at the University of Victoria (2002-2014), until he surrendered that chair to become Dean of Law at UVic (2013-2018) and finally Professor Emeritus from 2023 until now. He was appointed a Fellow of the Trudeau Foundation in 2009, Fellow of Royal Society of Canada in 2016, and Honorary Professorial Fellow at the University of Melbourne in 2023.

Thursday 6 March 2025, 6-7.30pm AEDT

Venue: Level 4, Common Room, New Law Building (F10), Eastern Avenue, Camperdown campus

CPD Points: 1.5

This event is proudly presented by the Julius Stone Institute of Jurisprudence at The University of Sydney Law School.