Michelle Foster from Melbourne Law School recently appeared on ABC’s Q & A where the legality of Labor’s Papua New Guinea Asylum Seeker resettlement plan was discussed. Continue reading
Daily Archives: 1 August 2013
Turning Points in the High Court: Remembering the Koowarta and Tasmanian Dam Cases
Peter Dombrovskis, ‘Rock Island Bend, Franklin River, Southwest Tasmania’ (1983).
By Dr Ann Genovese
2012 and 2013 mark the respective 30th anniversaries of the High Court’s decisions in Koowarta v Bjelke-Petersen [1982] HCA 27 and in Commonwealth v Tasmania [1983] HCA 21 (the Tasmanian Dam case).
Each of these cases is commonly understood to represent a turning point in Australia’s legal and political history: a shift to a different form of political engagement on complex questions about race, and the environment; and a shift in what those engagements could signify, nationally, and internationally. Cumulatively, the cases are also understood as marking a decisive jurisprudential turn, a consideration of a different engagement by the High Court of Australia with both international law and the politics of federal constitutionalism.
After 30 years, it is timely to reflect on the ongoing significance, in political and legal terms, of these two ground-breaking cases; yet also to review the complex ways in which the cases are remembered or understood as turning points. Two symposia hosted at the Melbourne Law School commemorated these anniversaries and the proceedings will be published in two special issues of the Griffith Law Review.
These symposia placed the cases into conversation with each other for the first time, opening new ways of approaching and writing about law’s authority and narratives as constitutive of an evolving Australian national identity into the 21st century. Continue reading
Protecting the Integrity of Securities Markets — What is an ‘Artificial Price’?: DPP (Cth) v JM
By Professor Ann O’Connell
In 1814 a uniformed man posing as ‘Colonel du Bourg’ arrived at Dover bearing news that Napoleon had been killed and his armies defeated. The effect on the London Stock Exchange was dramatic — more than £1.1 million of government bonds were sold in one day before it became clear that the news was a hoax. Captain de Berenger, who posed as the Colonel, was charged with having conspired by spreading false rumours to increase the price of the bonds so that he (and others) could profit from the sale (R v de Berenger (1814) 3 M&S 67). More recently, in January of this year an anti-coal activist released a fake press release purporting to be from the lenders to a mining project to be carried out by listed company, Whitehaven Coal Ltd. The press release announced that the lender was withdrawing from the project for ‘ethical reasons’. The effect was to cause panic selling and the price of Whitehaven’s shares fell dramatically before a trading halt was implemented.
In DPP (Cth) v JM [2013] HCA 30, the High Court considered the legality of a less dramatic way of affecting the securities market: strategically buying shares. The Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions alleges that JM asked a family member to buy shares in a company for the purpose of lifting its share price sufficiently high to prevent a bank from requiring extra collateral for a loan he took out to buy call options in the same company. JM has been charged with the crime of creating or maintaining an ‘artificial price’ in a financial market. In advance of his trial, the High Court agreed to resolve a dispute about the meaning of ‘artificial price’. Continue reading