They’ve changed the law in relation to legal professional privilege on us. The common law has been abolished, at least in relation to compulsory processes (discovery, subpoenas, interrogatories, notice to produce) in fora where the new Evidence Act, 2008 applies, and the adduction of evidence in those fora. Two legal professional privilege regimes are now [...]

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The short answer is — yes. Jack Brabham Engines Ltd v Beare [2010] FCA 35 is a decision on an application to set aside a subpoena.  One of the plaintiffs subpoenaed the police to produce the ‘criminal history records’ of one of the respondents.  The plaintiff said the documents were potentially relevant to the credit [...]

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Several recent posts have been about the implied waiver which is said to be an incident of clients suing their former solicitors for negligence.  They are simply case notes.  Some of the cases are English.  All were decided under a law different from that which from 1 January 2010 applies in Victorian court proceedings, a [...]

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Section 8 of the Evidence Act, 2008 says it does not affect the operation of the provisions of other Acts.  So, although the compellability and competence provisions and the admissibility provisions of the new Act are often spoken of as a code, those who say so are thinking about the continuing operation of the common [...]

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Now I have too many words in my Advanced Evidence paper, so you can have the first off-cut.
The uniform evidence legislation is comprised of:

The Evidence Act, 1995 (Cth.), which commenced almost 15 years ago on 18 April 1995;
The Evidence Act, 1995 (NSW), which commenced on 1 September 1995;
The Evidence Act, 2001 (Tas.), which commenced on [...]

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Res judicata does not attach to interlocutory orders.  It is open to the trial judge, for example, to vary them.  So much I knew.  Until I read In the Marriage of Bowron (1982) 8 Fam LR 651 (this adventure into the law of evidence is taking me to strange places), I had never thought about [...]

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Back from Vanuatu, a pleasant place, I am slaving away at a 10,000 word paper on the application of the Evidence Act, 2008 to civil cases involving lawyers.  In due course, no doubt, I will subject you to a serialised version of it.  One of the things I am considering is that species of implied [...]

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Update, 4 March 2010: The changes to legal professional privilege apply retrospectively to communications which pre-date the commencement at the beginning of this year of the Evidence Act, 2008.  See this post.

Update, 15 February 2010: ‘Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes’ has published a useful (but not exhaustive) summary of the provisions here.

Original post: Before you start [...]

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Two men litigated a case over $10,000 in VCAT’s Civil List before a sessional member. As per the norm in that list, they were unrepresented. That Civil List is a place a world away from the proceedings you read about in the law reports.  I must say I like the idea of an accessible tribunal [...]

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Until I had a look at this judgment, I thought that the best evidence of the value of land at a particular point in time would be what people in the real world actually offered to pay for it. In fact, there seems to be a lot of authority for the proposition that such [...]

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