I did a plagiarism case before the Board of Examiners last year, and looked up the cases then.  My colleague Patrick Over also reviewed them for his prosecution on behalf of the Legal Services Commissioner of the plagiarist solicitor in Legal Services Commissioner v WJK [2010] VCAT 108, and cleverly found a case from the [...]

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In Legal Services Commissioner v WJK [2010] VCAT 108, a sole practitioner who has written a legal text and published a number of articles succumbed to temptation when the pressures of life got to him and meant he did not have time to do a proper job of writing a 10,000 word research paper for [...]

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In the many panics during the Bar Readers’ Course when I was expected to adventure incompetently into the criminal law, the criminal lawyers whom I made sure to be nice to referred me to ‘the Bible’, Ross on Crime. Leafing through it disconsolately one day, I noticed the chapter entitled ‘Jazz’.  What a revelation.  After [...]

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To blog, you have to be able to write, type, and learn a new programme (Wordpress in my case) but there is really only one trick to blogging, and that is finding what to write about efficiently.  I rely on various sources, most of which I will keep under my hat, but the best is [...]

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I commend Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes’s post on what the law demands when giving evidence of conversations.  Contrary to a common heterodoxy, the witness who cannot recall the precise words can give evidence of the effect of the conversation.  The New South Welsh are the most excited about direct speech, especially in affidavits.  Personally, I [...]

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I like lawyers who state the law on the internet for free.  Australia is good at this in the sense of making raw materials available via Austlii.  What there is very little of is commentary, and exposition of the law. I have previously sung the praises of John Stratton’s NSW treasure trove of material about [...]

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After a couple of glasses of red wine late one night when everyone else in my household was asleep, I decided I needed this deed written in Latin on vellum in 1518. I pressed the buy button on the screen, and a bit more than a week later, a bit of 16th century Derbyshire was [...]

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This post aggregates hyperlinks to a series of articles published by an English firm, Wragge & Co, entitled ‘Litigation Survival Guide’.  It piqued my interest for the reasons set out below. Part 1 is ‘Escape to Victory — Points to Consider When Terminating a Contract’. Part 2 is ‘Protecting the Supply Chain’.  Part 3 is [...]

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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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It is very frustrating when you receive a judgment which skates over the points you think were good ones without grappling with them.  Turns out it is an appellable error of law.  The guy who won half a million dollars for assault by Connex officers after he spat in their face and broke his wrist [...]

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