| It was never conceived as a legal doctrine that could be argued or adjudicated by any court, so it's hardly surprising that terra nullius was such an obscure concept. |
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| The common law principle of terra nullius has been applied to the relationship between the Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal peoples of Australia. |
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| Nor was North America terra nullius, free for the taking, as was claimed later. |
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| It was not until the Mabo decision in the Australian High Court in 1992 that the concept of terra nullius was overturned. |
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| Instead, land occupied by pastoralists and hunter-gatherers was defined as terra nullius. |
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| Aboriginal people were not regarded as human beings, and all cultures have their own sort of collective fantasies, and the idea of terra nullius was a collective fantasy. |
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| The majority in the High Court rejected the doctrine of terra nullius, in favour of the concept of native title. |
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| Generally speaking, in international law nomadic peoples' lands were terra nullius, which means vacant land or land belonging to nobody, and open to colonisation. |
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| It's almost as if the goal was to preserve the legal fiction that was terra nullius – that the landmass of Australia was empty when the British arrived. |
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| The island was considered terra nullius until the Spitsbergen Treaty of 1920 placed it under Norwegian sovereignty. |
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