Here is a link to Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Bill, 2009. It is proposed that:

men who have sex with other men ’serially’ are to ’suffer death’;
it would be a crime to rent a house to a gay;
a woman who touches another woman with a view to seducing her will suffer life imprisonment; and
speech in favour of homosexuality [...]

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Do things move slowly in Western Australia?  I wrote about an estate matter which went on and on and on here.  Now a twenty-seven year old proceeding, which came to have as one of its defendants a famous QC has been dismissed for want of prosecution and the decision confirmed on appeal: Smith v Bank [...]

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Several times I have wondered, in my short career so far, whether a loan or other commercial agreement which provides for interest at a particular rate should be construed as providing for simple or compound interest.  My presumption has been that such a provision would be interpreted to provide for simple interest unless compound interest [...]

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Richard Ackland has reminisced about the 2009 indicia of the law’s assiness, and it’s worth a read.  Rich pickings: the artist formerly known as Justice Einfeld, Carmen Randazzo QC2B?, Anal Sheik etc. etc. none of which have been covered on these pages.  It almost tempts me to reintroduce ‘200#; law and war’, last seen in [...]

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(Thanks to A. Davey for the image.) I’m off to Ethiopia on Friday.  I have long wanted to go.  I am hopelessly attracted to the exotic. I arrived in Timbuktoo on a small boat carrying cement up the Niger River and went off into the Sahara with an indigo-robed Tuareg and a camel, I rode [...]

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Interrogatories are powerful.  They are also out of fashion, partly because no party interrogated ever answers them properly, occasioning a post-discovery hiatus when a trial might otherwise be set down.  In the Supreme Court, you get 42 days to answer. Then compelling proper answers takes weeks more, and suddenly a great deal of time has [...]

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Melbourne lawyer Dr Manhattan writes Quis Quistodiet Ipsos Custodes.  The Doctor has been generating useful stuff recently.  See ‘English Reports Available Online‘, which tells you how to find the English Reports up until 1873 online, ‘New Evidence Text Released‘, which has links to numerous resources on the uniform evidence legislation set to become law in [...]

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Victoria Legal Aid has a panel of solicitors to whom it refers indictable criminal matters.  A firm of solicitors had been on it for a while, then missed a deadline for applications for renewal. VLA had emailed the firm’s general email address, and the inexperienced receptionist (or former receptionist, for all I know…) had neglected [...]

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I have never before seen written down any law which explains what use may be made of the fact that you sent a letter to someone containing allegations which are not denied by a letter in response.  It is quite common to see lawyers’ letters which say ‘We note for the record that we do [...]

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The relatively new Supreme Court judge Justice Davies has provided a useful overview on the law in Victoria on the construction of arbitration clauses in 1144 Nepean Highway Pty Ltd v Leigh Mardon Australasia Pty Ltd [2009] VSC 226.  Her Honour found the clause meant what it said, and stayed the proceeding which had been [...]

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