Yet there is some precedent. On two other occasions in this federation’s 120-year history, external events – world wars – have precipitated fundamental changes to the compact between citizen and state. As Bond writes in Law in War, a lively study of legal developments on the home front between 1914 and 1918, World War I saw a ‘revolution of a government against its people, motivated by a higher cause: victory in war’. A century later, Bond’s analysis of the tools of that revolution is insightful as our laws are again co-opted, this time to defeat Covid-19.

Prior to Law in War, this subject was largely overlooked. Historian Charles Bean, commissioned in the 1920s to oversee the Official History of Australia in the War, had at first agreed to include a substantial section on domestic legal manoeuvrings. At the urging of federal solicitor-general Sir Robert Garran, Bean backflipped, noting that it was ‘doubtful if such a chapter is called for’. Garran, the man who wrote most of Australia’s wartime laws, thereby effectively ensured that there would be no sustained reflection on their impact. By providing the first ‘holistic examination of Australia’s First World War legal regime’, Bond aims to fill that ‘gap’.

She does so thematically across eight chapters, each focused on one or a handful of characters. This methodology was deliberate: ‘All too often,’ the academic writes, ‘I have found law to be divorced from people.’ Bond argues that this is a collective failing of the academy: ‘law is all about people. Individuals write the law. Individuals interpret the law. Individuals are held accountable by the law.’ She thus recounts the tales of an eclectic range of individuals – from Prime Minister Billy Hughes to suffragette Adela Pankhurst, from drug-makers George Nicholas and Harry Woolf Shmith to Indigenous serviceman Douglas Grant – to tell a broader story.

Bond ranges widely across different areas of law. She considers a statute that cancelled the intellectual property rights of German companies (spurring a local pharmaceutical industry), and another that limited the ability of ‘enemy subject’ employees to contest their termination, empowering widespread employment discrimination. Bond notes that a federal police force was created overnight by regulation after Queensland cops refused to arrest protesters who had egged Hughes. She also discusses the discriminatory legal barriers to Australians of non-European complexion enlisting, which prevented many Indigenous and Asian Australians from serving on the frontline.

Bond is at her best when discussing the draconian limitations on civil and personal liberties enacted during World War I. The story of Franz Wallach is harrowing: a Frankfurt-born merchant, Wallach had lived in Australia for more than two decades by 1914, and had renounced his German citizenship. Despite no evidence of disloyalty, Prime Minister Hughes’s personal dislike of Wallach and his metal-trading company saw the trader interned for four years. Wallach successfully contested his internment in the Victorian Supreme Court, but the federal government promptly issued a revised regulation. Wallach was rearrested before he could depart the courthouse. As one Labor MP quipped during legislative debate over detention powers, ‘the war seems already to have distorted our ideas of right and wrong’.

The government’s approach to political dissent had a similarly dictatorial hue. Bond outlines the various legal tussles of activist Pankhurst and her peers, which ultimately concluded unsuccessfully in the High Court. Despite a powerful dissent from Justice Henry Higgins – ‘constitutional limitations are not suspended; we have to decide in accordance with the Constitution’ – a majority upheld the validity of Pankhurst’s conviction for protesting.

Bond, though not blind to the unusual imperatives of war, suggests that the judicial branch failed to maintain adequate scrutiny of the executive. She quotes Justice Edmund Barton in another case: ‘We have nothing to say as to the wisdom or otherwise of any regulation: that is a matter for the Legislature.’ This approach, says Bond, is ‘disappointing’. With limited legislative scrutiny and an executive making law by regulation, ‘the courts were one of the few avenues available to the Australian people for a rigorous review of these wartime laws’. The High Court declined that role.

Law in War is written with scholarly rigour, complete with abundant primary and secondary sources, while remaining accessible for a generalist audience; this is no law textbook. Bond crisply explains legal concepts and is adroit at providing necessary context along the way (‘it is helpful to pause here to note’), rather than all at once. Despite the book’s often technical subject matter, she writes with flair and wit: ‘Resources and reputation enabled Franz Wallach to fight the law. Of course, the law won.’

Any possible critiques are minor: Bond is overly fond of internal cross-references (‘as noted earlier’), and chunky legislative extracts sometimes feel unnecessary. A lengthier book (Law in War is barely 200 pages long) might have considered the wartime legal experience elsewhere – was Australia typical or exceptional? But these shortcomings hardly detract. Bond’s latest book is engaging, insightful, and important.

Above all, Law in War offers a timely reminder that in situations of great upheaval, the law is not always a reliable guarantor of justice. During World War I, Australia’s laws served as tools of ‘discrimination, oppression, censorship, and deprivation of property, liberty and basic human rights’. Too often, lawyers and the judiciary were complicit. With Australians facing another era-defining challenge, we should learn from our mistakes. Law in War provides a helpful guide. As a British jurist once remarked, ‘amidst the clash of arms’, or, perhaps, personal protective equipment, ‘the laws are not silent’.