Court interpretation of indigenous agreements: database
The Centre for Energy, Petroleum and Mineral Law and Policy (CEPMLP) maintains a database of court/tribunal decisions dealing with documents involving indigenous parties (eg. treaties, impact & benefit agreements, petitions, land use agreements). The database can help parties working with developer-indigenous relations, by identifying relevant decisions and commentary on courts' approaches to indigenous agreements.
The database is free and fully searchable, and can be accessed here:
This database has been compiled from over 200 cases and articles from courts/tribunals in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States of America. The decisions collated for the database are those that interpret or apply documents involving indigenous parties. The database records, for each decision:
-
a brief summary of the decision (including URL where available);
-
the details of the document(s) involving indigenous parties; and
-
a summary of the court's/tribunal's engagement with that document.
The database's search function allows users to focus and find decisions and articles according to particular need. For example, if researching the relevance of fiduciary obligations in relation to indigenous agreements, the database allows quick collation of all materials relevant to that.
Research for the database was conducted with the assistance of funding from the Nuffield Foundation. More background on this project is available here.
