Academic

Aroney & Allan on Australian Federalism

By Lawrence Solum

Nicholas Aroney and James Allan (University of Queensland - TC Beirne School of Law and The University of Queensland - T.C. Beirne School of Law) have posted An Uncommon Court: How the High Court of Australia Has Undermined Australian Federalism (Sydney Law Review, Vol. 30, pp. 245-294, 2008) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

The authors contend that Australia's High Court, in deciding federal distribution of powers cases over the last century, has created an end product that looks like one of A P Herbert's Uncommon Law mock hypothetical cases. These were sustained parodies of common law reasoning in which each step in the fictional judge's train of thought followed plausibly from what went before. And yet from such unexceptionable starting points the conclusions reached were ridiculous. The same general sort of analysis is here applied to the High Court's federalism jurisprudence, the fit being a surprisingly good one.

Full post as published by Legal Theory Blog on June 12, 2008 (boomark / email).