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Legal Commentary

The Legal Soapbox

Thoughts on law, motherhood, religion, society, politics

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Last Entry: May 07, 2008 at 19:29:46

Skepticlawyer.com.au

Posted on May 07, 2008
Another reason why I have been a bit distracted lately… after two years of my own little blog, I am moving my blogging services elsewhere. I have decided to accept an offer to team up with Skepticlawyer (Helen Dale) from Catallaxy, and we are setting up a joint blog, Skepticlawyer...

Confirmed

Posted on May 02, 2008
No, I haven’t suddenly become a Christian or anything - but I found out today that my PhD was confirmed. It’s been a bit of a nerve-wracking week. I had to give a 25 minute presentation to the department on my topic. Somehow giving a talk to friends and colleagues is a very scary prospect, probably [...

Opes investors fail at first hurdle

Posted on May 02, 2008
I know that a some people have lost a lot of money through the collapse of Opes Prime, so it seems a bit ghoulish to be fascinated by it - but there you have it, I can’t help myself - I’m fascinated. There are so many interesting equitable and property law questions raised by it [...

Seinfeld makes it to court

Posted on May 02, 2008
I’ve written previously on how Alice in Wonderland has made it into many Court judgments. Well, now Jerry and Elaine have made it into a judgment too! In Parish Oil Co Inc v Dillon Companies Inc, the US Court of Appeals in Colorado mentioned Seinfeld in an anti-trust case: Indeed, the plaintiffs? reading would apparently render unlawful [...

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Expectant

Posted on April 30, 2008
Yes, it’s official now - I am expecting Baby No. 2. Well, most of you probably guessed from my post “Pregnancy is not an illness“. This now explains why I had to quit Missing Link a few months back. I have been finding it very hard to operate normally with “morning” sickness and the debilitating tiredness that [...

Cause and effect

Posted on April 27, 2008
I haven’t been too impressed with ethanol fuels for a while. My concern back then was “that if governments make emotional knee-jerk reactions, the cure may be as bad as the disease it is designed to alleviate.” In that context, the current food crisis is a salutory reminder of the nature of cause and effect...

Teaching by example

Posted on April 27, 2008
A science teacher friend told me that “teaching by real life example” is all the rage these days. People have to run around the room pretending to be electrons, rather than learning about electrical current in the abstract. It’s supposed to make learning more “approachable” and easier...

The Spirit and the Law - consumer protection and mediums

Posted on April 24, 2008
A certain section of the British spiritualist community is protesting again the repeal of the Fraudulent Mediums Act 1951 (UK). The Independent reported the other day that the recently formed Spiritualist Workers Association (SWA) believes that the repeal of the legislation is discriminatory towards spiritualism...

The Force definitely wasn?t with him?

Posted on April 24, 2008
A drunken man in Wales dressed up in a black bin bag and cape and attacked two cousins with a metal crutch. Why would he do that? Well, apparently he wished to join the Dark Side of the Force. The cousins had recently set up a Jedi church in Holyhead, and were making a film [...

Not so much gibberish as derivative and boring

Posted on April 18, 2008
I was rather amused to see that the Judge hearing the J.K. Rowling copyright infringement case has described Rowling’s plotlines as “gibberish”. To explain briefly, as outlined in this article from The Times, Rowling is asking the Manhattan Federal Court to block publication of The Harry Potter Lexicon, a guide to places and names in the [...

God?s law and the law of the State

Posted on April 17, 2008
What happens when you have a particular group in society who are not minded to follow the law of the State, but prefer to follow God’s law as they interpret it? Recently this question has come up in relation to Sharia law, particularly after the Archbishop of Canterbury said that some aspects of sharia law would [...

Jah on their side?

Posted on April 16, 2008
This article about the collapse of a legal trial against some Rastafarians cracks me up. Apparently the five Rastas had been charged with cannabis dealing, and the trial had been running for two weeks when one of the police officers recognised a paralegal from the defence team for one of the defendants...

Judicial activism

Posted on April 16, 2008
The common law is an interesting and organic beast. To explain: our basic system of law is judge-made law. The common law became somewhat inflexible in medieval times, and thus many litigants started appealing to the King. The King got sick of dealing with the petitions, and palmed them off to the Lord Chancellor...

Toddlers as witnesses

Posted on April 11, 2008
The other day, I was driving my 2 year old daughter to creche. She announced with satisfaction and great confidence from the back of the car, “One day, Mummy broke my fingers.” I saw her make an illustrative wiggle of the said fingers in the rear view mirror...

Now I?m really disturbed

Posted on April 06, 2008
Someone found my blog via a google search for “whale penis”. I didn’t even know that I had used that second word in this blog! I know I used the word “whale” in a post featuring a picture of a little boy swimming with a whale...

Property law and the One Ring

Posted on April 04, 2008
Can it really be true? Yes, it is true. The blog Law is Cool features an essay about Lord of the Rings from a property law perspective! Here is a brief extract: Consider the following facts which seem ripped from a first year property law exam: Sauron holds ownership in the Ring through accession, by working one [...

Fitna

Posted on April 04, 2008
The other day, I watched the film Fitna on YouTube, a film about Islam by Dutch right wing politician Geert Wilders. I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. I had read some interesting reviews by Skepticlawyer at Catallaxy, Pommygranate at Australian Libertarian Society Blog and Saint at Dogfight At Bankstown...

Some people will try anything

Posted on March 31, 2008
I thought I’d seen all the pathetic excuses possible for trying to get out of legal proceedings (including seceding from Australia, declaring the Court to be a hotbed of Freemasons and/or claiming that the Constitution is invalid for spurious reasons)...

Updates

Posted on March 31, 2008
Update 1: Thomas Towle, the Mildura driver who killed 6 teens and seriously injured 4 others, has been sentenced to 10 years in gaol. I told you it would be interesting to see what his sentence would be! Although Towle was convicted of dangerous driving (a lesser offence), he will be serving more time than the [...

Earth Hour - what a crock

Posted on March 30, 2008
I am very pleased that I managed to avoid Earth Hour: what an absolute crock. In fact, I was at a Chinese restaurant at the relevant time. “I wonder if they’ll turn out the lights?” mused my husband. Not a chance, and thank goodness for that...

Student evaluations

Posted on March 18, 2008
I think I’ve mentioned the phenomenon of student evaluations before on this blog. Sometimes, as I’ve explained in the earlier post, I’ve received some very amusing ones. Most have been pretty positive although I have received some critical evaluations...

Not just monkey business

Posted on March 16, 2008
What happens if a person is brought up in a way that is more likely to cause them to act violently? Should they be criminally responsible for their actions? That’s a difficult enough question, but what happens if the perpetrator of a crime is a monkey? These questions are raised by the case of Chico [...

Sartorial style and the law

Posted on March 15, 2008
I was reading a post at Pete Black’s Freedom to Differ on the dress of law professors. It did make me laugh. Certainly, when I went to teach, I consulted a friend on what she thought I should wear. I was somewhat anxious. My initial plan had just been to wear the same suits as I [...

The law weighs in on the side of gingers

Posted on March 14, 2008
I was commenting to a learned friend and colleague that the posts which receive the highest hits on this blog are the ones which deal with discrimination towards red heads. The comment threads on the posts reveal that there’s a lot of proud gingers, and a lot of insane people with a prejudice against red hair...

Ideology, law and teaching

Posted on March 13, 2008
As I am a university lecturer, I was interested to read about the Young Liberals’ campaign to “out” left-wing lecturers. That seems to miss the point to me: it’s a bit unpleasantly reminiscent of a McCarthyist witch hunt. I have to say that in law school I had a variety of lecturers, from open Marxists to known advisers [...

Why, oh why? Juries and the reasons for their decisions

Posted on March 11, 2008
It’s easy to be an armchair judge or jury member. I must admit that I was surprised when I read that Thomas Towle was found not guilty of six counts of culpable driving causing death. Instead, the jurors found him guilty of dangerous driving causing death, which is a lesser offence carrying a lesser sentence...

Pregnancy is not an illness?

Posted on March 06, 2008
…but sometimes it sure as hell feels like it. Boom tish! When I was having my daughter, we had a trainee midwife attending us as one of her “case studies” for qualification. She had a sticker or something with the motto “Pregnancy is not an illness”...

Through the looking glass darkly?

Posted on February 22, 2008
After the rather serious and contentious nature of my previous post, I thought I might move to less serious material (hat tip to Dave Bath for sharing this with me). Comparative Law Blog notes that Lewis Carroll’s books Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass are the most widely quoted children’s books in judgments...

?You have to die, so that I can live.?

Posted on February 20, 2008
Last night, I watched a rather depressing documentary on SBS called The Anatomy of Evil. It was about people who perpetrate genocide. I’ve been morbidly fascinated with this question for a while now, as I’ve explained in an earlier post. I’ve never quite been able to fathom how people could shoot/gas/blow up an innocent civilian...

Costs under a void costs agreement

Posted on February 14, 2008
The case of Equuscorp Pty Ltd v Wilmoth Field Warne (a firm) [2007] VSCA 280 deals with the question of legal costs under a costs agreement which was void by operation of statute, but in the event, the client was estopped from alleging that the agreement was void...

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