This collection of articles, commentaries and book reviews, published here in the Federal Law Review, forms only the second symposium on electoral law published in Australia. Interest in how democratic choice is regulated and how elections are run – the rules of the game of electoral politics and the ways in which its dynamics intersect with those rules – is a staple of media debate and political science. Yet it is only beginning to emerge as a focus of sustained attention in the legal academy.In the Australian and New Zealand common law tradition, the law governing elections in particular and democracy in general has been historically subsumed, and to a degree lost, under the broader rubric of ‘constitutional law’. In part this has been imposed from without; a product of the dicing up of the discipline of law into broad doctrinal categories to suit the legal profession, a practice perpetuated by the dictates of the admission rules. However, it has also been the consequence of academic neglect: an overlooking of the potential of the field by legal scholars.