A Mini-public of Academics: Experimenting with Deliberative Democracy and Indigenous Cultural Competency in Legal Education

Abstract

In this short article we report on a novel consultation event held in 2017. Fifty-two Indigenous and non-Indigenous legal academics convened in Melbourne to draft and promulgate standards to be followed by law schools across Australia for promoting Indigenous cultural competency. The consultation took the general form of a mini-public. A mini-public is a decision-making body whose members are randomly selected from – but demographically representative of – a broader public. Public decision-making by mini-publics is now routine. Yet ours was a distinctive variation, in that the mini-public purported to represent not the whole public of a jurisdiction, but only a particular professional class within it – in this case legal academics in Australia. We convened this mini-public of legal academics in order to give greater legitimacy to the promulgated guidelines for cultural competency in law school curricula. The article explores the content of the consultation, centring on its suggestions for improved breadth, content and quality of legal teaching, as it touches the lives of Indigenous people. Most of all, however, the article assesses the unique use of a mini-public to represent an unusually small and highly formally educated public. We generally rely here on our own qualitative observations about the novel consultative process and its methods.