The recognition of law as both a potential driver of and a barrier to coastal climate change adaptation is well documented. The impacts of a rapidly changing climate to the Australian coast include environmental and property damage arising from increased frequency and severity of coastal weather events, including storm surge, coastal erosion and coastal flooding. Coastal management policy and planning laws are relied on to manage these impacts and competing interests in the Australian coast. When impacts of a global phenomenon are operationalised at the local scale and in a culturally significant place such as the Australian coast, it opens a rich field from which both the constitution and construction of law in place can be explored. This presentation builds on a paper published in Geographical Research, and explores these tensions as they were performed in the Vaughan litigation revealing a construction of the Australian coast as place.