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Law

There is a senior partner at my firm who famously harasses young women particularly when he has been drinking at social events. I was groped on two separate occasions. Nothing was done about it the first time I reported it. I did not report it the second time.

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On a frosty January morning in 2019, I found myself listening to oral argument at the Supreme Court of the United States. The cases I witnessed were not destined for headlines – no abortion, free speech, or death penalty cases that day – but I was still fortunate to get a seat. Queues snaked around the building, with tightly controlled ticketed entry and heavily armed security. As a scholar of constitutional courts, I was delighted by the public interest (less so by the guns), even if a Trump shut-down of nearby tourist attractions may have augmented the numbers. But none of us attending that day expected to witness something extraordinary: Clarence Thomas speaking.

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Justice or vengeance? This is always the question raised by war crimes trials, although it might be noted that they are a relatively recent historical phenomenon. Some were proposed at the end of the Great War but never eventuated. The original and best known is, of course, Nuremberg at the end of World War II ...

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Although a subject of endless fascination in the hermetic world of the legal profession, the judiciary seldom excites the interest of the broader public. Despite the efforts of senior judges to promote understanding of the legal system, the community seems largely content simply to trust that the machinery of justice is working ...

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Watching Out belongs to a rare class of book. Written by a lawyer, concerned largely with law, and touching upon such legal esoterica as interim injunctions, it defies all odds in still being eminently accessible to a lay audience. It has, predictably, set off a frisson of excitement in legal Australia, where each new Burnside title ...

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Australia’s national identity is as complex as the people who make up the nation and the historical forces by which it was made. Our Indigenous peoples, whose unique histories precede the nation’s by more than fifty thousand years, are central to that identity ...

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Although easy to miss amid the commotion of Brexit, Britain’s Human Rights Act (1998) is locked in a fight for its life. Besieged by a hostile press and beholden to a government that has pledged its repeal and replacement, its days are almost certainly numbered. It is against this fraught backdrop that Conor Gearty’s On Fantasy Island: Britain, Euro ...

The Tim Carmody Affair: Australia’s greatest judical crisis by Rebecca Ananian-Welsh, Gabrielle Appleby, and Andrew Lynch

by
November 2016, no. 386

With a few notable exceptions (Michael Kirby springs to mind), judges in Australia do not have a high public profile. Many non-lawyers would struggle to name a judge currently ...

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Philippe Sands, a barrister and Professor of International Law at University College London, brings together in this multi-faceted book the perpetrators of the worst crime yet devised by man ...

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The practice of the law is about stories. The stories the parties tell to the judge, the story the judge tells back or, if you like, the judge’s review of the parties’ stories. Along the way there can be much that is frankly boring to onlookers, or indeed the parties themselves, but also drama, pathos, and humour, both intentional and the opposite. And past case ...