Word: nullius
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...taken a very long time to drag the Australian courts and government into admitting that the Aborigines owned their land before white arrival--that the doctrine of terra nullius (no- man's-land) was legally invalid. This finally happened in 1992, when Eddie Mabo, a member of the Meriam clan on the Murray Islands in the Torres Strait off northern Australia, successfully argued before the high court that his people had been there before the whites and had never given up their ancient rights of ownership. This was the first "native title" victory in Australian...
...other issue is that of reconciliation with the Aborigines. Australia was unusual in that when European occupied the continent in the wake of the founding of the penal colony of New South Wales in 1788, it was regarded, in legal terms, as being "terra nullius," that is to say, uninhabited. Thus the Aborigines were not deemed to have any claims to native land title, nor was there felt to be any need, as in North America and New Zealand, to negotiate treaties with the native inhabitants. Legally, Aborigines were invisible; dispossession could proceed without even the formalities of legal process...
...this changed in 1992 when the High Court of Australia dismissed "terra nullius" as a doctrine based on misinformation and found that it was possible for native land title to have survived. The Mabo decision, as it had come to be know, took its name from the principal plaintiff in the case, Eddie Mabo, who came from the Murray Islands off the coast of northern Queensland. The court upheld this particular claim to native land title, and indicated that mainland Aborigines could similarly argue a case for such title...
...give birth, but only a father can confer full membership in the human community, i.e., "legitimacy." A child that no man has claimed -- either through marriage or later legal "legitimation" procedures -- becomes somehow less worthy and less human. In English common law, an out- of-wedlock child was filius nullius, meaning child of no one. The kid was a bastard; the mother, being single and female, counted for nothing...
...case, the U.S. could not have claimed sovereignty over the moon, even if it had been so inclined. A treaty drafted in 1966, and since signed by both Washington and Moscow, asserts that the moon is terra nullius, or no-man's-land, open to exploration and use by all nations...