The fifth annual Melbourne Doctoral Forum on Legal Theory will be held at the Melbourne Law School, Melbourne, 6-8 December 2012. It will again bring together higher research students and early career researchers, who in different disciplines and across diverse fields of scholarship, engage with law and its theoretical and methodological questions.

This year the forum will explore how the challenge of ‘grounding’ law could offer a critical and political engagement with and responsibility for law. This is a different task to legitimating or substantiating a new foundation, basis or ground for law. Deconstructive jurisprudence has exposed the constituted violence inherent in every asserted or disavowed ground of law. What are the challenges of a ‘grounded’ jurisprudence? How can law be reflexively constituted by the demands of contingency or its context? Some elaborations of Australian Indigenous jurisprudence, for example, speak of a form of law which needs to contextualised rather than decreed: law is less a force that compels and more something that needs to be actualised, rebalanced and re-patterned into the land.