Judge Iain Ross, who was the head honcho of VCAT’s Legal Practice List, and the Tribunal’s Vice-President, has been appointed to the Supreme Court, presumably taking up the spot left behind by a good and honourable man and quiet champion of human rights, Justice David Harper, who has been appointed to the Court of Appeal.  [...]

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A former client of mine, dissatisfied with the adverse outcome in a complaint he lodged making serious allegations against a senior member of the profession has tipped me off to an own motion investigation conducted into the Bureau de Spank by the Victorian Ombudsman.  The results, reproduced below, will not assist morale at the Bureau [...]

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This is a note about a decision by a judge who is only a year older than me, Justice Nye Perram, a novel and somewhat unsettling circumstance: Collard v Australian Securities & Investments Commission (No. 3) [2008] FCA 1681. I looked him up because the judgment is so beautifully written, and found a welcome [...]

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Calderbank offers — those marked ‘without prejudice except as to costs’ — are one of those subjects which recur so often that single judge decisions are constantly coming out, but one never knows exactly which ones to read. They all say much the same thing, with an equal degree of fuziness, and the illusion [...]

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Stephen Witham (pictured) moved into Michael Flaherty’s flat. The relationship quickly soured when Witham assaulted Flaherty’s girlfriend, and stood over people for drugs and money. So Flaherty got some mates together, hit Witham about with baseball bats, hogtied him with ropes and cable ties, wrapped him in a doona, popped him in [...]

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Update, 2 June 2008: When I was writing the original post, I badly wanted to link to this classic motion to dismiss a criminal charge against a kid who called his principal ‘a fucker, a fag, and a fucking fag’, but it seems it was one thing I did not take with me when I [...]

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Ok, so it’s the man better known as Justice Mark Weinberg of the Federal Court of Victoria, but damn is the man a judge of many courts at once. If I read Deakin University’s staff profile properly, his Honour is concurrently a judge of:

the Federal Court;
the Supreme Court of Norfolk Island (he sentenced Janelle [...]

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My impression is that the legal ethics dialogue is highly developed in the United States. The extent to which people practice what is preached over there is something I have heard word about but can’t guess at too accurately. Maybe its lawyers are more prone to extreme badness and so the discussion has [...]

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I had heard the rumour a fair while ago from the most impeccable sources in VCAT and the Supreme Court that the Supreme Court’s Justice Bell was hot tip to take over from Judge Bowman as VCAT’s head. Now it’s confirmed. Frankly, though it would not be every lawyer’s cup of tea, it’s [...]

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Happy new year, readers. 2007 was a big one for me, and it seems that lots of interesting things happened. So I made a list.
The Bar: My senior mentor, Peter Riordan SC, was elected Chairman of the Bar Council. Peter Hayes QC died, and the Ethics Committee took Peter Faris to task for commenting to [...]

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