Last Friday’s oral special leave hearing in Canberra received blanket coverage because of the appearance, in the list and in person, of Rebel Wilson, hoping to restore the defamation damages award that she lost in Victoria’s Court of Appeal. She failed, which is unsurprising, as most applications for special leave to appeal to the High Court are unsuccessful. Moreover, the Court is in the midst of downswing on  special leave grants, compared to: past Novembers (where there have always been at least three and up to eight in the past decade); past three monthly cycles (three in the past three months, less than half the previous quarterly low of seven in late 2014); and past annual trends:

On the other hand, Wilson was fortunate to be one of six matters heard orally  this month(compared to forty heard – and rejected – on the papers) and also to have the Court only dismiss her application after hearing both sides’ oral submissions (the only one of the four unsuccessful oral matters on Friday to be afforded that courtesy) and a four minute adjournment.

The two cases that beat the long odds to be granted special leave this month are appeals from:

• Lee v Lee; Hsu v RACQ Insurance Limited; Lee v RACQ Insurance Limited [2018] QCA 104, which concerns a factual dispute about whether a car that crashed was driven by the injured person’s father or the injured person himself. The Court of Appeal found that, while much of the evidence supported the family’s claim that the father was the driver, DNA evidence showed his son’s blood (but not his blood) on the driver’s airbag (consistently with the son’s injuries, which included tetraplegia.) Writing for the Court, McMurdo J held that the facts were finely balanced and, although the trial judge erroneously said that the son testified via a translator, ‘it is not demonstrated that the trial judge misused the advantage which he had from hearing and seeing this evidence as it was being given.’
• OKS v Western Australia [2018] WASCA 48, which concerns whether a child sexual abuse conviction can stand despite a trial judge’s incorrect direction about the complainant’s credibility. The trial judge, referring to evidence that the complainant had previously told several lies about the abuse or the later circumstances, told the jury to ‘not follow a process of reasoning to the effect that just because [the complainant] is shown to have told a lie or she has admitted she told a lie, that all of her evidence is in fact dishonest and cannot be relied upon” The Court of Appeal accepted that this direction was wrong, but, after ‘giving very significant weight to the jury’s verdict of guilty’ on the first charge against the defendant, held held that there was ‘no substantial miscarriage of justice’.