Two judgments published yesterday by Gageler J reveal that previously suppressed High Court events in mid-January involved an application by former NSW Legislative Councillor Eddie Obeid to delay and perhaps ultimately prevent his trial on a charge of misconduct in public office. In  the first of yesterday’s judgments, Obeid v The Queen [2016] HCA 9, Gageler J explained his reasons for refusing Obeid’s request to stay his trial until the High Court had considered his application for special leave to appeal the NSW Court of Criminal Appeal’s rejection of his pre-trial arguments (that his parliamentary position at the time of the alleged public misconduct either fell outside of the scope of the offence charged or meant that only the Legislative Council could try it.) In the second, Obeid v The Queen [No 2] [2016] HCA 10, Gageler J explained why both the fact of Obeid’s application for special leave and a stay and Gageler J’s ruling rejecting the stay were not published by the High Court until now: it was because Gageler J himself suppressed that information (at the ex-politician’s request.)That explains why the relevant court list only revealed that an application for an application for a non-publication order was to be heard, but not who made the application or what it was about.

The two sets of reasons for judgment from Gageler J explain the events and his reasoning in considerable and very useful detail. Continue reading →

Australian criminal defence lawyers have wasted no time responding to February’s UK ruling overturning the common law rule in England and some other countries that deemed anyone engaged in a criminal enterprise liable for any crimes committed by their colleagues, no matter how serious, if they foresaw the mere possibility that the crime would occur. A challenge to Australia’s similar common law (left untouched by the English decision) is already before the High Court in Smith v the Queen, a South Australian matter that was referred for argument before an expanded High Court bench just a week before the UK judgment. Smith’s 20-page submissions, lodged last week, spend just two pages on the issue that was the subject of the referral (the role of intoxication in such cases, a matter already before the Court in an appeal by Smith’s co-defendant.) Rather, the balance was devoted to the following new question:

Should the doctrine known as “extended joint enterprise”, enunciated in McAuliffe v The Queen (1995) 183 CLR 108, be reconsidered and revised or abandoned, in light of the decision of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom in R v Jogee [2016] 2 WLR 681?

Whether the High Court actually considers this question turns on multiple exercises of the Court’s discretion, including whether or not Smith can amend his earlier application for special leave to appeal, whether special leave will be granted and whether Smith can ask the Court to reconsider  its earlier rulings on this issue.

In many ways, this challenge resembles the Court’s current reconsideration of advocates’ immunity to negligence actions, another commonly criticised part of the common law. Continue reading →

The ‘News Room’ of the High Court’s website contains the following announcement:

Retirement of Chief Justice
The Chief Justice of the High Court has advised the Prime Minister of his intention to resign from office with effect from midnight on 29 January 2017. The resignation will take effect a few weeks ahead of the Chief Justice’s 70th birthday on 19 March 2017 in order that his successor may take up office at the commencement of the 2017 sittings on 30 January 2017.
Andrew Phelan.
Chief Executive & Principal Registrar. 23 Mar 2016

The Chief Justice’s resignation comes 47 days before the date mandated by the Constitution.

The publication of the Chief Justice’s retirement plan is a welcome development Continue reading →

An election is of obvious interest to the legislature and executive. However, it is also increasingly relevant to the work of the government’s third branch. Each of the last three federal elections has required the Court to resolve complex questions urgently:

• two months prior to the 2007 election, the Court struck down legislation from 2006 barring all prisoners from voting.
• two weeks before the 2010 election, the Court struck down legislation from 2006 removing the 7 day ‘statutory grace period’ allowing people to enrol after an election is called.
• five months after the 2013 election, Hayne J, sitting as the Court of Disputed Returns,  declared the election of Western Australian senators void due to the loss of 1370 ballot papers.

The 2015 election, whenever it occurs, will continue this trend.

So far, two pre-election High Court cases have been announced. Continue reading →

The ‘News Room’ heading on the High Court’s website contains a notice from the Court’s Chief Executive titled ‘Changes to Special Leave’ that is mostly devoted to the following change:

In represented applications, a Panel of Justices will determine in the first place whether an oral hearing is warranted. If the Panel considers that no oral hearing is required, the application will be granted or refused special leave on the papers. If an oral hearing is required, the application will be listed for hearing as soon as practicable.

This announcement continues a decades long trend away from oral hearings in the Court’s function of determining its own appellate docket and brings the Court’s practices closer those in comparable courts in the UK, Canada and the US. In previous years, the Court moved from five-judge benches to three-judge and then the current two-judge benches, and generally stopped giving oral hearings to self-represented applicants. The current announcement indicates that there will now be up to two hearings for all special leave applications, one on the papers and then a possible second oral hearing. It seems that the first non-oral hearing will always involve a decision on whether or not to proceed to an oral hearing and, if there is to be no oral hearing, will also determine whether or not special leave will be granted.

There are a number of aspects of this new process that are not entirely clear from the notice. Continue reading →

Friday’s High Court special leave hearings received particular attention in Queensland, with the Court rejecting an application for leave to appeal by Brett Cowan, who was convicted of murdering Sunshine Coast teenager Daniel Morcombe in 2011. The case drew attention because of the tragedy of a 13-year old’s violent death, the publicity given to police suspicions about Cowan at the coronial inquest, the oddity that Cowan was one of two otherwise unrelated child sex offenders who may have been in the vicinity when Morcombe vanished, and the playing out of the dispute about the Chief Justiceship of Tim Carmody during Cowan’s state appeal. Today’s hearing was attended by Morcombe’s parents, who were relieved that the matter was at an end and reportedly critical of the appeal process. However, the national Court’s refusal of leave will disappoint those who hoped it would revisit its earlier support for complex police stings such as the one used to obtain admissions from Cowan, especially given the recent revisiting of such operations by the Supreme Court of Canada, where the method originated.

The High Court nevertheless granted leave to appeal six cases, all of which are especially interesting: Continue reading →

Today, the High Court unanimously rejected an appeal by two anonymous Victorian police officers who argued that they should not be publicly examined by Victoria’s anti-corruption commission about an alleged assault of a detainee in a Ballarat police station because they had been notified that they may be prosecuted for the assault. The Court held that its recent decisions on a common law rule obscurely named the ‘companion principle’, which prevents executive action that interferes with the accusatorial process unless it is allowed by clear legislative language, does not apply to people who are not yet formally charged with an offence. Six of the Court’s seven judges explained their reasons in the usual short format that characterises the French court. But Gageler J added a more interesting concurrence discussing a statute the majority didn’t mention: Victoria’s Charter of Human Rights and Responsibilities Act 2006. This prompts the question: why wasn’t Victoria’s landmark human rights statute addressed by the balance of Australia’s peak court in a major decision involving the human rights of Victorians under a Victorian law? Continue reading →

In a long-awaited and unusual joint judgment of two peak courts, the UK Supreme Court and the Privy Council, five judges yesterday ruled that the common law took a ‘wrong turn’ on the criminal law of complicity at least 19 years ago.The courts heard appeals by people convicted of murder after their partners in crimes –  respectively, an English domestic assault and a Jamaican taxi robbery –  instead stabbed the intended victims. At issue were rulings by the Privy Council in 1985 and the House of Lords in 1997, building on decisions by Australia’s High Court from 1980,  that such defendants could be convicted of murder if they were merely aware that their accomplices ‘might’ murder someone in the course of another crime. Yesterday’s unanimous judgment found that the twin decisions misunderstood the earlier authority, disregarded principle and, most disturbingly, ‘bring the striking anomaly of requiring a lower mental threshold for guilt in the case of the accessory’ – the accomplices’ awareness of the possibility of a murder -‘ than in the case of the principal’- the stabbers’ intent to cause serious harm. Accordingly, they overruled the 1985 and 1997 decisions, detailed a new narrower standard for liability and outlined ground rules for reviewing decades of potentially wrong convictions.

But yesterday’s ruling does not apply in Australia. Continue reading →

Yesterday’s news of the death of United States Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonin Scalia will dismay many, including those who agree with his views and many others who simply enjoyed reading his eloquent and witty judgments. The news also inserts a dramatic new dynamic into United States politics, given the Court’s outsized role in American political life, the sharing of the appointing role between an elected executive and a legislative house and Scalia J’s position as part of a recognisable (although far from invariable) conservative majority in the Court’s many 5-4 decisions. In all these respects, Australia differs from America. Indeed, on the latter point, as UNSW’s Professors Lynch and Williams reported last Friday at the Gilbert & Tobin Constitutional Law Conference, the current High Court now has fewer dissenting judgments than ever.

Deaths of sitting High Court judges are now a rarity, in part because (unlike in the US), appointments of Australian judges are no longer for life. While the last death of a sitting judge was Lionel Murphy’s in 1986, it was not a shock, coming six months after the announcement that he was suffering from inoperable colon cancer. Rather, the most recent surprise death was that of Keith Aickin in 1982, Continue reading →

The Court today held its first special leave hearings for 2016, in its Sydney and Canberra registries. All the Sydney applications were rejected, while in Canberra, the Court granted special leave in just one matter and also referred a pair of appeals to the full court [EDIT: connected to a matter granted special leave in November]. Matters where leave was refused include two further pre-trial challenges by alleged foreign incursion promoter, Hamid Alqudsi, and a high profile appeal by a farmer who lost his organic certification when genetically modified crops grown by his neighbour contaminated his land.

The lower court decisions to be considered by the Court are: Continue reading →

Yesterday’s new decision on civil procedure and insurers is not the only significant ruling of the High Court this week. Wednesday’s day-long hearing of a pre-trial application by accused promoter of foreign incursions, Hamdi Alqudsi, ended with the following statement by French CJ:

At least a majority of the Court is of the opinion that the following order should be made:
1. The question “Are ss 132(1) to (6) of the Criminal Procedure Act 1986 (NSW) incapable of being applied to the Applicant’s trial by s 68 of the Judiciary Act 1903 (Cth) because their application would be inconsistent with s 80 of the Constitution”, should be answered “Yes”.
2. The motion is dismissed.
The reasons of the Court will be published at a later date.

The effect of these orders is that Alqudsi’s trial will be by a jury of his peers, rather than by judge alone as he preferred. The orders also strongly suggest a rejection by a majority of the High Court of an effort by Alqudsi, broadly supported by the Commonwealth and four states, to overturn or limit a thirty-year old 3-2 ruling by the High Court that effectively gave prosecutors, but not courts or defendants, the power to opt for a judge-alone trial of serious federal crimes.The Court’s majority holding in 1986’s Brown, although certainly a plausible reading of the bare text of s80 of the Constitution, is reviled by many as a perversion of one of the Constitution’s few apparent protections of human rights. However, we won’t know quite what the Court has said about s80 until the Court’s reasons emerge in next month or so.

Of more immediate interest is why the High Court opted to make its orders immediately Continue reading →

In September 2013, I reported that long-running and complex Bell Group litigation had settled immediately before an appeal to the High Court was to be heard. The litigation began in 1995, and related to loans given to Alan Bond’s Bell Group of companies. However, it seems that the litigation just won’t die.

As I noted just before settlement, the question of how the settlement sum was to be distributed was potentially controversial. The litigation had been funded by the WA State Government-owned Insurance Commission of Western Australia (ICWA). Western Australian motorists had to pay an annual levy of $50 on third party insurance from 1993 to 1996 to assist ICWA, known as the WA Inc levy. That promise of controversy has now been realised. Continue reading →

Wednesday saw the High Court’s first decision of 2016, concerning one of the most controversial issues in Australia: offshore immigration detention. The judgment is a blockbuster, consisting of five judgments and over 42000 words (not including the 339 footnotes), answering (or declining to answer) a special case consisting of fourteen multi-part questions. As is the Court’s practice since late 2002, the judgment was accompanied (and, online, preceded) by a one-page judgment summary, describing the proceedings and, in a single paragraph, its outcome:

The Court held, by majority, that the plaintiff was not entitled to the declaration sought. The conduct of the Commonwealth in signing the second MOU with Nauru was authorised by s 61 of the Constitution. The Court further held that the conduct of the Commonwealth in giving effect to the second MOU (including by entry into the Administrative Arrangements and the Transfield Contract) was authorised by s 198AHA of the Act, which is a valid law of the Commonwealth.

It is likely that this summary was responsible for speedy and accurate media reports that the challenge to the ‘Nauru solution’ had failed, in turn prompting fresh political debate about whether the federal parliament or executive should maintain or end the regime, and specifically the fate of 267 asylum seekers slated to return to Nauru.

However, as The Guardian observed on Wednesday evening, ‘High court decisions are not football matches: it’s not always clear who has won and by how much.’ Continue reading →

As the Canberra Times reports, the High Court has just released its Annual Report for 2014 – 2015, which contains an alarming warning about circuit hearings around the country in light of budget cuts imposed by government imposed ‘efficiency dividends’. In French CJ’s Overview, he says at page 16:

In the 2014-2015 year, income received by the High Court including from its principal source, namely parliamentary appropriations, was $16.336 million. Operating expenses including unfunded depreciation charges of $4.802 million amounted to a total of $21.167 million. The underlying deficit after taking out unfunded depreciation allowances was $29,334.

The High Court has a small administration. Its total staff comprises (not including Justices) 99 persons. Thirty-seven are full-time and part-time ongoing staff, 36 are full-time and part-time non-ongoing staff and 26 are casual staff. The Court operates nationally with extended logistical requirements and large fixed costs. Its level of funding is low compared with the Parliament and many parts of the Executive Government. Historically its appropriated revenues have not kept pace with unavoidable cost increases particularly in building related expenditure. Many of the Court’s administrative costs are fixed, for example, statutory charges for electricity to operate the building. Government imposed efficiency dividends affect core elements of the Court’s operations such as Registry and Library staffing. The Court has undertaken comprehensive reviews of its Registry and administrative processes and structures since 2008. The position continues to be that there is no material scope to reduce the Court’s administrative costs without cutting significant elements of its operations including circuit visits which it undertakes from time to time to Perth, Adelaide and Brisbane dependent upon the workload in those capitals.

[emphasis added]

It would not be positive if the High Court were no longer able to go on circuit to some capital cities (or, as the Canberra Times suggests, any other capital cities other than Canberra). The High Court is a court for all of Australia, and as such, it is important that it has a presence in all States and Territories of Australia.

Back in the days when I was a State judge’s associate, I became enraged by a government questionnaire which described the court as a “business unit.” Courts are not “business units”. They do not produce profits. While courts certainly should not waste money, and should have an efficient administration, it sounds like the High Court has already achieved this. Fundamentally, the High Court is an essential arm of government whose role it is to adjudicate disputes. What price justice?

A week ago, the High Court’s registry listed the following matter before Gageler J at 11am in the Court’s Sydney registry:

APPLICATION FOR NON-PUBLICATION
ORDERS
[NAME SUPPRESSED] v THE QUEEN

While it appears likely that this is a criminal law matter, no other information about it is public knowledge. Apart from insiders (and whoever else happened to be in the courtroom that day), no-one knows who the applicant is, who (or what) the non-Queen party was, what orders were already in place, what orders were sought, the grounds for the application, the arguments made, what orders (if any) were made and the reasons for Gageler J’s decision (if any.) In these respects, the High Court is similar to other Australian courts, where such opaque listings are commonplace. Thanks to its practice of publishing transcripts of its hearings online for free, the High Court is usually much more open than other Australian courts.  However, no transcript of any hearing from last Wednesday has been published.

However, transcripts from a different matter a week earlier are more illuminating. Continue reading →

One of the most closely watched High Court matters of 2016 is an application to appeal a Queensland Court of Appeal decision from December, concerning a high profile domestic homicide. In R v Baden-Clay [2015] QCA 265, the Queensland court (including the state’s new Chief Justice Catherine Holmes) rejected the Brisbane real estate agent’s complaints about the conduct of his homicide trial, but accepted his argument that the jury’s verdict of murder was unreasonable:

[T]here remained in this case a reasonable hypothesis consistent with innocence of murder: that there was a physical confrontation between the appellant and his wife in which he delivered a blow which killed her (for example, by the effects of a fall hitting her head against a hard surface) without intending to cause serious harm; and, in a state of panic and knowing that he had unlawfully killed her, he took her body to Kholo Creek in the hope that it would be washed away, while lying about the causes of the marks on his face which suggested conflict…

In consequence, the appeal against conviction must be allowed, the verdict of guilty of murder set aside and a verdict of manslaughter substituted. Counsel for the respondent should file and serve submissions as to sentence by 15 January 2016, with the submissions for the appellant to be filed and served by 22 January 2016.

Last week, Holmes CJ revisited the final sentence of that judgment on the application of Queensland’s DPP. In doing so, she addressed when a lower court should (and shouldn’t) change course in response to a planned High Court appeal. Continue reading →

Today, the High Court issued its final judgment for 2015, number 53 in the media neutral citation list, one more than last year. Looking back over the Court’s judgments published on Austlii, these numbers are amongst the Court’s lowest. Out of the Court’s 113 years, there have been only fifteen with fewer than 53 (media neutral citation) judgments: 1903 (3), 1926 (52), 1928 (51), 1929 (46), 1930 (52), 1939 (41), 1940 (46), 1941 (43), 1942 (40), 1943 (50), 1944 (42), 1948 (50), 1983 (47), 2010 (49) and 2014 (52). The majority of these have ready explanations  – the Court’s truncated first year and the depression and war years – that the more recent years lack.

But such raw counts can easily mislead, as not all published judgments are equal. Continue reading →

In sittings today in Melbourne and Sydney, the High Court held its final special leave hearings for 2015, allowing appeals from the following four cases to proceed to the national apex court:

• Betts v R [2015] NSWCCA 39, a sentencing appeal concerning an horrific instance of domestic violence, where Betts stabbed his former partner repeatedly over a lengthy period when she arrived at their flat to remove her belongings, intending that both would die together. The NSW Court of Criminal Appeal rejected Betts’s arguments that his offence was not aggravated by the extent of his partner’s injuries and was mitigated by his own extensive deliberate self-injuries (including injuries caused by his partner with his consent), but accepted his arguments that the trial judge wrongly aggravated his sentence because of his partner’s vulnerability and wrongly failed to mitigate his head sentence due to prison being especially onerous for him given his permanent self-injuries. However, the Court nevertheless let his sixteen-year sentence stand given the seriousness of his offending.

• Cosmopolitan Hotel (Vic) v Crown Melbourne Limited [2014] VSCA 353, concerning a refusal by Crown to renew two leases at its Southbank Entertainment precinct, despite the tenant having been required to extensively renovate the premises in order to obtain an earlier renewal of the lease. The Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal had found that a statement by Crown employees that it would ‘look after’ the tenants at the next renewal if the renovations were high quality was enforceable as a collateral contract. Victoria’s Court of Appeal held that a Supreme Court judge rightly overturned this finding on the basis that the the statement was not intended to be a promise and was too vague to enforce, but nevertheless remitted the case to the Tribunal to determine what remedy (short of renewing the lease or compensating the tenants for all the profits they might have made) Crown should give the tenants for breaking its promise to look after them.

• Deal v Kodakkathanath [2015] VSCA 191, an appeal against the failure of a compensation claim by a primary school teacher for injuries to her knee that she sustained when she fell off a small step-ladder while removing unwieldy paper artworks from a wall. The majority held that, although the trial judge’s rejection of her claim that the school breached an occupational health and safety regulation concerning ‘hazardous manual handling tasks’ was premature, inadequately explained and involved some misreadings of the statute, it was nevertheless correct because that regulation did not cover injuries caused by falls.

• R v Nguyen [2013] NSWCCA 195, an appeal concerning what were described as ‘unusual, even unique, factual circumstances’ presenting ‘a challenging sentencing exercise’ – the fatal shooting of one plain clothes police officer by another in response to a shot fired by Nguyen in excessive self-defence. The NSW Court of Criminal Appeal held that the trial judge was wrong to find that Nguyen’s offending was mitigated by his mistaken belief that the cops (who were executing a search warrant) were robbers, as that fact was already implicit in Nguyen’s conviction for manslaughter (rather than murder), and also that the trial judge was wrong to give Nguyen wholly concurrent sentences for the shot he personally fired (which wounded the police officer’s arm) and the shot the other police office fired (which killed the police officer), as each involved distinct consequences and criminality. Describing his offence as ‘a most serious example of the crime of manslaughter’ and noting the need to deter crimes against the police, the appeal court raised Nguyen’s total sentence from nine years and six months to sixteen years and two months.

Legal academic Ken Parish has a post at Club Troppo marking the death of Roy Melbourne, the defendant in a 1999 High Court criminal appeal. The post is an especially poignant one, because Melbourne was convicted of murdering Parish’s mother-in-law, who was minding Parish’s daughter while they shopped for her seventh birthday present.

Parish’s post is a profound insight into the impact of High Court appeals (amongst other things) on people affected by tragedy. Parish recounts:

When the jury’s guilty verdict was delivered I was surprised to find myself sobbing uncontrollably, not through sorrow but relief that this part of our ordeal was over and we could get on with grieving and putting our lives back together. However I was wrong about that last part. Melbourne appealed unsuccessfully to the Court of Appeal and then again to the High Court. Special leave was granted but the substantive appeal failed, although only by a margin of 3:2. The legal ordeal lasted until August 1999.

And he also notes that the description of Melbourne’s crime by McHugh J (and also Callinan J) in the High Court appeal understated the horror of the event, including the fact that it took place in the presence of Parish’s daughter. These awful details stand in sharp contrast to the somewhat dry issue that was debated in the High Court: whether the jury should have been directed that Melbourne’s clean record for the 60-odd years prior to his crime (apart from a drink-driving conviction) was relevant to determining whether or not to believe his statements immediately after the killing, including not recalling the killing, believing that Parish’s mother-in-law was harassing him with late-night noises (actually a defective sprinkler system) and his medical history. A majority of the Court held that the direction was not needed, with Kirby J and Callinan J dissenting.

The most moving part of Parish’s post is his own response to Melbourne’s death, two weeks after he voluntarily returned to prison from parole:

This morning I received a phone call from a detective from the Major Crime Squad. Melbourne was found dead in his cell last night. The detective was careful in what he said, but it sounds like he committed suicide. After a few moments of shocked silence I thanked him and remarked that I almost felt sorry for him, though not quite. But I do feel sorry and so does Jenny Parish. What a dreadful tragedy from beginning to end, for everyone involved including a lonely embittered old man named Roy Melbourne. I’ve been sobbing again today, not out of relief this time but from grief for all that has been lost.

In a comment, Parish adds that Melbourne’s death reportedly followed his return from work release after a law and order controversy in the Northern Territory, which Parish had criticised in an earlier post.

Predicting which cases will get special leave to the High Court is generally difficult. Last month, two Victorian judges refused an injunction to preserve the subject-matter of a case that was the subject of a special leave application, stating that ‘we are not persuaded that the application for special leave enjoys sufficient prospects of success to warrant a stay’. The High Court granted special leave in that matter last Friday. But it is possible to make strong predictions during the hearing itself. For example, a clue came during the applicant’s argument that the case ‘is a matter of real importance’ when Keane J interrupted to say ‘I do not think you need to worry about how important it is.’ The applicant promptly stopped his argument, correctly predicting that special leave would be granted. This was confirmed when, at the conclusion of the respondent’s argument, French CJ said that ‘we need not trouble’ the applicant for a reply. An even clearer sign of success is when the High Court does not call on the applicant at all, for example in this matter in October.

More unusually, in two matters this month, a lawyer faced the prospect of arguing for a special leave result after the Court had already resolved the matter against his client. Continue reading →

In sittings in Canberra and Sydney yesterday, the High Court granted special leave to appeal six decisions, consisting of two administrative law matters and four criminal law ones. As well, in the special leave hearing concerning R & M v IBAC, discussed here, French CJ continued the order Nettle J gave  suppressing the names of the two police officers who IBAC wants to publicly examine ‘until further order’, despite Nettle J’s earlier expressed ‘doubts as to whether publication of the name of either applicant at this stage of the proceeding would give rise to any real risk of prejudice to a fair trial, when and if they are ever charged with any offences arising out of the subject matter of the inquiry’.

The cases where the High Court will hear appeals (most likely early next year) are:

Continue reading →

Yesterday, separate from the Court’s usual special leave schedule, the High Court granted special leave to appeal a ruling of the full court of the Supreme Court of Tasmania decided three months ago. (HT: Joel Townsend.) Having recently granted special leave in a NSW case to reconsider the scope and existence of advocates’ immunity from negligence suits in respect of their court work, the new Tasmanian grant raises the scope of solicitors’ liability in negligence for their non-court work, specifically their duty to the beneficiaries of wills they prepare.  Continue reading →

A procedural hearing on Tuesday hinted at Nettle J’s views on open justice in Victoria, an issue that has been recently debated in The Age. The matter concerns an effort by two police officers who are potentially facing criminal charges for misconduct to stop IBAC (Victoria’s anti-corruption commission) from publicly examining them about that misconduct. The pair’s argument, which rests on recent High Court decisions on whether Australian statutes allowing people to be compulsorily examined on matters that tend to incriminate them must give way to fundamental principles of accusatorial justice, failed in Victoria’s Court of Appeal late last month. The pair now wish to appeal to the High Court and Nettle J was asked to decide two urgent questions ahead of their application for special leave to appeal.

One issue was whether the pair could be named publicly ahead of the special leave application. Continue reading →

In a seemingly unannounced change, which occurred somewhere between May and July this year, the High Court’s website now contains a database of its own judgments, consisting of all judgments since 2000, and also all ‘unreported’ judgments from 1924 to 2002. The site has its own (somewhat unfashionable) url –  http://eresources.hcourt.gov.au – and you can link to summaries and judgments via urls in this domain that incorporate the media neutral citation. The database is browsable and searchable, and provides copies of the judgments in .rtf and .pdf (but not html) format.  The website states that new judgments will be published ‘on the day they are delivered’, although presumably they will be up within the hour, as is typical on Austlii and Jade. For now, transcripts of the Court’s hearings are not available on the Court’s website.

This change brings Australia’s national court closer into line with the practice of comparable courts Continue reading →

US anti-abortion activist Troy Newman has failed in his last minute High Court bid to challenge the revocation of his Australian visa. His visa was revoked days before he was due to tour Australia. Newman has espoused controversial views regarding abortion, suggesting in a co-authored book that persons who seek abortions and doctors who perform them should be executed for murder. Minister for Immigration Peter Dutton cancelled his visa pursuant to s 128 of the Migration Act 1958 (Cth). Section 128 allows the Minister to cancel a visa before the non-citizen holder enters Australia on the basis of the considerations set out in s 116. The relevant consideration in this case was s 116(e)(i): namely, that the presence of the visa holder in Australia might pose a risk to the health, safety or good order of the Australian community or a segment of the Australian community. Continue reading →

A long-running Adelaide mystery, the 1983 disappearance of 11 year-old Louise Bell, is currently being explored in a Supreme Court murder trial. The Advertiser reports a prosecutor’s description of an alleged conversation between prisoners at Mt Gambier Prison:

Pfennig started to talk about Michael Black, how he had murdered him,” she said. “He said he couldn’t tell anyone where Michael Black was ‘because there is a chick there’. “The other prisoner asked ‘what chick?’ and Pfennig replied ‘Bell’.”

If true, this amounts to an admission by Dieter Pfennig, not only to his responsibility for Bell’s death, but also to the correctness of a 1995 High Court ruling upholding Pfennig’s conviction for the murder of Black, who vanished near the Murray River in 1989. That judgment is arguably the Court’s most significant (and most controversial) ruling on evidence law. Continue reading →

Malcolm Turnbull joins a select group: lawyers who have argued before Australia’s national court and then gone on to lead the nation. In 1988, the future Prime Minister capped his greatest success in his career as a barrister by successfully defending his lower court victories in the Spycatcher case in the High Court. The case famously concerned the UK government’s attempts to block the publication of a book by a former MI5 agent, Peter Wright. Having succeeded at trial in arguing that the book’s supposedly confidential contents was mostly already public overseas, Turnbull secured a majority ruling in the NSW Court of Appeal (consisting of two future High Court judges, Kirby P and McHugh JA) and then a unanimous victory in the High Court, which ruled that Australian courts applying the law of confidentiality ought not protect the security interests of an overseas government. Turnbull also succeeded as a junior barrister in an earlier case before the national court, when he defended Noel Chrichton-Browne in the Court of Disputed Returns.

A previous Prime Minister with a much more impressive record before the High Court is Robert Menzies, Australia’s longest serving leader. Continue reading →

Last Friday, the High Court granted special leave in four cases. One is especially newsworthy: the return of the long-running dispute about the validity of various bank fees to the High Court. As Katy Barnett outlines here,  the Court in 2012 held hat such fees are subject to the rule against contractual ‘penalties’ despite being expressed as contractual obligations, (rejecting a preliminary ruling by the trial judge in favour of the banks.)  This year, the Full Court of the Federal Court nevertheless ruled that none of the fees were penalties. As Katy Barnett predicted, that ruling will now be considered by the High Court. But not all of the Court: the trial judge (who wrongly ruled that the fees weren’t subject to the rule, but also held that late credit card payment fees were penalties) was Gordon J, who has since joined the national court. That almost certainly means that she won’t participate in the High Court’s new consideration of the case.

The other three cases granted special leave include one from the Tasmanian courts, ending a six year drought of Tasmanian cases in the national court. The three cases are: Continue reading →

In his decision yesterday rejecting an application to recuse himself from the Trade Union Royal Commission on the grounds of apprehended bias, Commissioner Dyson Heydon considered whether a reasonable bystander would think (contrary to Heydon’s own assertion) that Heydon would  read all of his email attachments (including one describing the nature of the function he had agreed to speak at.) The ACTU’s counsel, Robert Newlinds SC, argued:

People don’t get appointed to the High Court of Australia unless they are considered truly brilliant lawyers, and what the truly brilliant lawyers have over and above truly ordinary lawyers, they have that special ability to absorb incredibly quickly and distil facts, and an ability to retain facts so absorbed and distilled, so as to fit them into the wider picture of the particular legal problem at hand….  So, the reasonable hypothetical bystander is going to think you’ve read this email.

But the Commissioner countered that the reasonable bystander would have a quite different view of former High Court judges’ reading habits: Continue reading →

In 2013, the High Court held that there was no requirement to prove innocence in malicious prosecution in the case of Beckett v New South Wales [2013] HCA 17. I wrote an opinion on the case here. Ms Beckett’s malicious prosecution case was then remitted back to the New South Wales Supreme Court for decision. Readers may be interested to hear that the New South Wales Supreme Court has now determined that case. Continue reading →

Yesterday, both houses of Victoria’s parliament approved a motion to request that the Parliament’s Public Accounts and Estimates Committee ‘ inquire into and report no later than 20 October 2015 on allegations made against the Auditor-General, Mr John Doyle, in a formal grievance dated 12 August 2015, by a member of his staff’. Although the request does not detail the nature of those allegations, the Committee’s remit includes whether ‘the Parliament should give consideration to the removal of the Auditor-General from office’ under s. 94C(5) of Victoria’s Constitution. And, although also not detailed in the motion, it appears that the inquiry will be conducted by a very recently retired High Court judge (and current professorial fellow at Melbourne Law School.) Continue reading →

The High Court holds ceremonial sittings to mark significant events: welcomes to judges, farewells to judges, appointments of Queen’s Counsel and Senior Counsel, first and final sittings of judges in particular cities, and final sittings in particular buildings. Such sittings are also held in memoriam for late judges.

On 10 August 2015, the High Court held a Sitting in Memory of the Late Honourable John Leslie Toohey AC in Perth. The transcript is now available here. The Court notes that Justice Toohey’s Western Australian predecessor, Sir Ronald Wilson, was similiarly honoured with a ceremonial sitting some ten years ago, at which Justice Toohey was present. A ceremonial sitting has also been held for the Late Honourable Sir Harry Gibbs in 2005. Presumably a ceremony will be held for Justice Jacobs, who also passed away this year.

Edelman J’s obituary for Justice Toohey was posted on the blog here.

Earlier this month Sir Anthony Mason presented the 21st annual lecture named in his honour at Melbourne Law School and hosted by the Law Students’ Society.

Sir Anthony offered a commentary on contemporary High Court jurisprudence on the relevance of the concept of proportionality in administrative and constitutional law. His focus was on the recent cases of Li, Monis, Unions NSW and Tajjour, which Sir Anthony presented as offering competing perspectives on the place and test for proportionality in Australian law. Sir Anthony did, however, reflect on some of the cases he was involved in from which he traced an historic attention to proportionality by the High Court. These cases included the bicentennial case, Davis v Commonwealth and the refillable bottle case, Castlemaine Tooheys.

Sir Anthony argued that Li represented “a more positive attitude to the use of proportionality” among this Court than past, and he seemingly endorsed the use of proportionality in judicial review to soften the extremely strict standard of Wednesbury unreasonableness.

On the constitutional law freedom of political communication cases of Monis, Unions NSW and Tajjour, Sir Anthony articulated three emergent approaches to proportionality. From Monis, he described Kiefel, Crennan and Bell JJ as grounding an extensive proportionality test (so called ‘structural proportionality’) from European developments. He also distilled competing limited proportionality tests by Gagelar J in Tajjour and by Keane J in the Unions NSW case that would reshape the Lange test for validity of laws that impede political communication if they were to be embraced by the court. As readers of the blog will know from the analysis of Professor Adrienne Stone, how the court resolves its grappling with proportionality might bring clarity to the extent and character of the Australian constitutional freedom of political communication.

A video recording of the lecture can be viewed online.

In today’s special leave hearings in Perth, the High Court granted special leave to appeal on two Western Australian matters. One of those – on a politically sensitive topic, damages for convicted criminals wrongly held in immigration detention – was relied on by Australian Human Rights Commission President Gillian Triggs to recommend $350,000 in damages for another immigration detainee and High Court litigant, John Basikbasik, resulting in attacks on her role and character earlier this year (as discussed here by Katy Barnett.)

The two matters where leave is granted are: Continue reading →

“The type of issue that could be canvassed under Section 51 of the constitution — simply at the moment, in Clause 21, it just says ‘marriage’,” Mr Morrison said. “You could equally put in there opposite- and same-sex marriage and clarify very clearly what the meaning of the constitution is on this question, and to reflect [what] some would argue has been a societal change since the constitution was first written.”

Mr Morrison acknowledged the High Court had already ruled on it. “Justices of the High Court have already expressed opinions on this issue, that’s fine, but what I am saying is I would prefer the Australian people decide this: not me, not [High Court Chief Justice Robert French], but the Australian people.”

Federal Minister for Social Services Scott Morrison here refers to Cth v ACT [2013] HCA 55, where six members of the Court said that ‘When used in s 51(xxi)’ of the Constitution, the federal Parliament’s power to make laws about marriage, ‘”marriage” is a term which includes a marriage between persons of the same sex.’ Attorney-General George Brandis later relied on the same case to declare that ‘No constitutional referendum is necessary in this case.’

Given the High Court’s 2013 holding, what would be the legal effect of the referendum? There are two possibilities to consider. Continue reading →

The High Court held another single location hearing of special leave applications last week in Sydney, ahead of a further day of hearings when the Court sits in Perth this week. Last Friday, the Court granted leave in just one case, while refusing leave in all others, including yet another matter addressing the Court’s trilogy of rulings on accusatorial justice, and a case addressing a major divergence between NSW and Victorian courts on the interpretation of the so-called ‘uniform evidence legislation’.

The judgment where leave to appeal has been granted is Jackson Lalic Lawyers Pty Limited v Attwells [2014] NSWCA 335, which concerns advocates’ immunity from negligence actions. Continue reading →

The Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security is currently holding any inquiry into a Bill to deprive dual citizens of their Australian citizenship if they engage in particular sorts of conduct (including particular terrorist activities and foreign incursions and recruitment), defined by reference to offence provisions in the federal Criminal Code. In evidence before the Committee on Tuesday, Professor George Williams reportedly predicted a speedy High Court challenge to the Bill’s constitutionality:

UNSW professor George Williams told a Senate inquiry on Tuesday that it was the most “problematically drafted bill” he had ever seen, with more constitutional problems in it than any he had given evidence on. This included a law that allows ASIO to detain and question any Australian for up to a week and foreign fighter legislation aiming to restrain Australians returning from conflict zones in Syria and Iraq. Professor Williams had “no doubt” such a law would be challenged in the High Court and had already been approached by “prominent solicitors” who had clients facing charges that are included in the bill. “It’s such an obvious one to bring a challenge to; I don’t see why they wouldn’t to escape loss of their citizenship.”

But the High Court’s decision last year on Queensland’s bikie laws places a potential roadblock in the face of any such challenge: the requirement that the challenger have ‘standing’ to challenge the laws. Continue reading →

The federal Law Enforcement Legislation Amendment (Powers) Act 2015 (Cth) comes into force today. At the Bill’s second reading speech in March, Minister for Justice Michael Keenan explained that the Bill responds to a set of recent court decisions on the powers of crime commissions (as discussed by Anna Dziedzic here, here and here.) In its X7 decision from 2013, a narrow majority of the High Court held that the Australian Crime Commission could not use its compulsory examination powers to examine a person charged with drug trafficking offences about those offences, while a later decision overturned drug convictions where the trial prosecutors had been illegally given access to transcripts of compelled examinations by the NSW Crime Commission. According to Keenan, the effect of these decisions have been felt well beyond the world of drug prosecutions: Continue reading →

On its traditional special leave hearing day this session, the High Court held hearings at only one of its registries (Sydney, but with video-links to Melbourne and Adelaide), instead of the usual two. Of the nine matters heard, none were criminal and only one was granted. Much more unusually, the Court yesterday granted special leave in another matter, without any oral hearing. Both new cases are interesting: Continue reading →

Opinions on High welcomes auspulaw.org to the blogosphere:

AUSPUBLAW posts contributions from leading public law experts – including academics and practitioners – across Australia. The Blog seeks to promote greater engagement with public law issues and a national platform for informed debate about current issues in public law.

Because of the central role of Australia’s High Court in matters of public law, the subject-matter of the Australian Public Law blog, hosted by UNSW’s Gilbert and Tobin Centre for Public Law, overlaps with this blog, especially if the concept of public law is interpreted broadly.

An example is today’s AUSPUBLAW post on the High Court’s recent decision in Queensland v Congoo [2015] HCA 17 Continue reading →

Fresh on the heels of his visit to Melbourne Law School, later this month Chief Justice French will be speaking at the fundraising dinner celebrating the 30^th Anniversary of the New South Wales Environmental Defenders Office (NSW EDO). He will do so at a time when government funding cuts for the nation’s environmental community legal centres mean that they are under threat (including of late in the NT and WA). The NSW EDO appears to be withstanding national funding cuts and those by the NSW government in 2013 (see this piece by Amelia Thorpe from UNSW) and continues to work on national and local matters – particularly case law, capacity building and reform. Continue reading →

Last week, UNSW’s Gilbert and Tobin Centre for Public Law held a workshop on Great Australian Dissents. The  judgments nominated by the attendees were tweeted during the proceedings and included thirteen High Court dissents from 1915 to 2013:

• New South Wales v Commonwealth [1915] HCA 17; (1915) 20 CLR 54 (Barton J)
• R v Federal Court of Bankruptcy [1938] HCA 10; (1938) 59 CLR 556 (Dixon & Evatt JJ)
• Chester v Waverley Municipal Council [1939] HCA 25; (1939) 62 CLR 1 (Evatt J)
• Re Richard Foreman & Sons Pty Ltd; Uther v Federal Commissioner of Taxation [1947] HCA 45; (1947) 74 CLR 508 (Dixon J)
• Australian Communist Party v Commonwealth [1951] HCA 5; (1951) 83 CLR 1 (Latham CJ)
• Victoria v Commonwealth [1975] HCA 39; (1975) 134 CLR 81 (Mason J)
• Australian Conservation Foundation v Commonwealth [1980] HCA 53; (1980) 146 CLR 493 (Murphy J)
• Hospital Products Ltd v United States Surgical Corporation [1984] HCA 64; (1984) 156 CLR 41 (Mason J)
• Chamberlain v R (No 2) [1984] HCA 7; (1984) 153 CLR 521 (Deane J)
• Leeth v R [1992] HCA 67; (1992) 67 ALJR 167 (Deane & Toohey JJ)
• Langer v Commonwealth [1996] HCA 43; (1996) 186 CLR 302 (Dawson J)
• Al-Kateb v Godwin [2004] HCA 37; 219 CLR 562 (Gleeson CJ & Kirby J)
• Monis v The Queen [2013] HCA 4 (Heydon J)

Although my own nomination was Deane J’s anguished dissent in the Chamberlain case, my workshop paper identified a forgotten judgment from exactly one hundred years ago as arguably the greatest dissenting judgment of all time. Continue reading →

Yesterday, in Isbester v Knox City Council [2015] HCA 20, the High Court unanimously quashed a 2013 decision by a local council ordering that the plaintiff’s dog, Izzy, ‘be destroyed’, observing that the decision:

affects the owner of the dog. Whether one describes an interest in a dog as a property right, or acknowledges the importance of a domestic pet to many people, the appellant is a person who may be affected by a decision which will require her interests to be subordinated to the public interest.

The Court held that, because the panel the Council formed to decide Izzy’s fate included a council employee who had prosecuted the plaintiff for the offence of owning Izzy when the dog bit a person’s finger (a ‘serious injury’ under Victoria’s Domestic Animals Act 1994), her involvement in the later decision about Izzy’s destruction created a risk of apprehended bias. Izzy’s fate now depends on a fresh decision by the council, made without any involvement by the earlier decision-makers or the prosecutor.

The case is an unusual illustration of how a final court of appeal like the High Court can sometimes be required to make decisions about life and death. Continue reading →

Sir Kenneth Jacobs, former Justice on the High Court from 1974 to 1979, has passed away aged 97. The High Court noted his passing and his contributions to the court in a media release:

The Court notes with sadness the recent passing, in the United Kingdom, of Sir Kenneth Jacobs KBE, who served as a Justice of the Court from 1974 to 1979. Sir Kenneth, who was born in Sydney in 1917, graduated from Sydney University with a Bachelor of Arts in 1938, served with the Australian Imperial Forces during the Second World War and on his return to Australia graduated in 1947 with a Bachelor of Laws with First Class Honours and the University Medal. He practised as a barrister in New South Wales and was made Queen’s Counsel in 1958. He served as a Judge of the Supreme Court of New South Wales form 1960 to 1974, including eight years on the Court of Appeal culminating in his service as its President from 1972 to 1974. He was appointed to the High Court in 1974 and retired on 6 April 1979. His judgments in the Court, which are still quoted, made an important and lasting contribution to the development of a number of areas of public and private law.

Fuller biographical details are available via the Court’s website here.

An obituary in The Australian provides further details about the circumstances of his retirement from the Court in 1979 and his later life:

Sir Kenneth Jacobs, a self-described liberal who resigned from the High Court in 1979 after being misdiagnosed with stomach cancer, has died aged 97….  Then chief justice Garfield Barwick didn’t want Jacobs to resign, but Jacobs, then aged 61, felt the prognosis was so dire that he would be a drain on the court and left on April 6, 1979. When he did not suffer the predicted downturn in his health, Jacobs consulted another specialist who told him that he had only suffered a painful condition called diverticulitis.

Jacobs considered suing his first doctor, but decided against it and left Australia for England in the early 80s with his British-born wife Eleanor. He settled in Wiltshire and took up bookbinding — and later printing — as he settled into village life .After Lady Eleanor died in 2002, he went back to school and completed a Masters in Classics at London University.

Wikipedia lists the date of his death as 24 May 2015. Our condolences to his family.

Thanks Melissa Castan (@MsCastan) for alerting us.

In advance of the swearing-in of Michelle Gordon as the 52nd justice of the High Court on 9 June 2016, ABC’s Radio National has spoken about the ceremonial speeches of female judges with ANU’s Heather Roberts. These are events that Dr Roberts describes for the uninitiated as having ‘a bit of a ring of a combination between a eulogy for the living and an Academy Award acceptance speech’. And there are discernible differences in the events and between the speeches given in the past for the inauguration of men and women: one of the central topics of the Radio National program. Continue reading →

Melbourne Law School was honoured to hear French CJ give the 2015 Harold Ford Memorial Lecture. This year’s topic was “Trusts and Statute”, a fitting nod to the late Professor Ford and his expertise in both trusts law and corporate law. Chief Justice French discussed the history of trusts and the way in which statute intertwined with trust law from a very early stage. He also discussed the impact of legislation on trust law in various different areas, including charities law, tax law and corporate law. His comments on the need for coherence, and on the difficulties and advantages of statutory intervention were of particular interest.

His Honour’s presentation was videoed and is available for viewing here.

At a hearing on Monday, Gageler J ordered the ‘removal’ to the High Court of a NSW matter challenging the constitutionality of recently enacted NSW legislation retrospectively validating some past actions by that state’s Independent Commission Against Corruption. The Judiciary Act permits the High Court to move any current constitutional or federal dispute in any Australian court directly to the High Court if one or more parties (or an Attorney-General) applies. Last Tuesday, Gageler J agreed to expedite the request to move the application and ordered the parties to provide written submissions. According to Monday’s reasons, those submissions (which are not publicly available) were persuasive:

I am persuaded to take this course having regard, in particular, to the potential for an early resolution of the constitutional issue by this Court to result in a significant saving of time in the hearing and disposition of the proceeding between the present parties that is now pending in the Court of Appeal, as well as to the resolution or substantial resolution of a number of other proceedings now pending in the Supreme Court of New South Wales in which the same issue arises, or is likely to arise.

Indeed, the removal was supported by the party challenging the legislation and was not opposed by ICAC. (By contrast, see here on unsuccessful applications for removal.)

The current ICAC matter has close ties to two separate High Court judgments that were brought down on April 15 this year. Continue reading →