Tweet Update: I knew that the study of autolitigation would be nicely developed somewhere. Former barrister Malcolm Park brought to my attention his article that was published in (Winter 1992) 81 Bar News 79-80, ‘On Both Sides of the Record’: ‘It is accepted law that a person cannot appear as plaintiff and defendant in the [...]

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Tweet Welcome to the blogosphere to Andrew Downie.  He is a barrister in Melbourne Chambers, of which I am a member.  Alarmingly, he nominates Williams’ Civil Procedure as his favourite book. He is blogging about commercial law at The Civil Lawyer.  He is tweeting too. I know of another barrister of Melbourne Chambers who will [...]

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Tweet Tress Cox are putting on a seminar series I think is interesting.  Big firms typically all put out a case note about the same latest cases, and their clients yawn.  Tress Cox has chosen a different path: a seminar each about 5 landmark — but not necessarily recent — cases, with the catch phrase [...]

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Tweet Pia Warne has been distracting me from blogging recently.  She was born a bit more than a week ago. But tweeting has also distracted me.  Twitter is a micro-blogging platform.  I had never been there until just before I started tweeting: here is my Twitter page.  Twitter involves following and being followed.  I tweet [...]

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Tweet The table of contents of new issues of Legal Ethics Journal are available online.  Its general editor is Christine Parker from Melbourne University.  Its advisory board features a number of Australians too: Adrian Evans, Monash University, Reid Mortensen, University of Southern Queensland, and Gino Dal Pont, University of Tasmania.  Unlike the rest of the [...]

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Tweet Monash University’s prolific Professor Adrian Evans has put out a new book on lawyers’ ethics, published by Cambridge University Press.  In the process of looking it up, I noticed that Adrian is the Co-Chair of the International Bar Association’s Professional Ethics Committee, which sounds like a good gig.  Here’s the blurb (sounds interesting): ‘Legal [...]

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Tweet The Federal Court heard a case about this scratchie: Kuzmanovski v New South Wales Lotteries Corporation [2010] FCA 876.  Whether the plaintiff had a $100,000 winner or not depended on whether in Australia ‘bathe’ means ‘swim’.  Did the picture of the man doing freestyle at C1 show a man who was bathing, as the [...]

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Tweet The rather beautiful English blogger, Afua Hirsch, at once a barrister and a Guardian correspondent, has posted a beautifully written obituary to Lord Bingham, pictured.  It is definitely a blog post, rather than something more formal belonging to the print version of a newspaper, and it is a fine example of its form, like [...]

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Tweet Even judges of appellate courts and legal regulators get it wrong.  Either I am getting grumpier or the error is becoming more common: [2009] NSWCA 278; [2009] NSWCA 379; [2010] NSWCCA 6. Even Chief Justices get it wrong: [2008] NZSC 55 at [54]. ‘Practice’ is a noun.  ‘Practise’ is a verb.  So: ‘The practitioner’s [...]

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Tweet Given how often companies execute documents, and the consequences of getting it wrong, I have always found the law on the subject weirdly complicated.  Perhaps that’s just because I’m a litigator and never quite cottoned on to a commercial lawyer’s basic skill.  But a beautifully written Clayton Utz file note by John Elliott, about [...]

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