Friday, January 27, 2006

Fingered!

›
What makes fingerprint evidence interesting is the increasing unlikelihood that we all have different fingerprints. This, at least, is what ...
Tuesday, January 24, 2006

Index to these blog entries

›
To access my Index to all the entries on this blogsite, up to the end of the last month, click on the link on the right.

Recklessness

›
What does "reckless" mean? Where a person can be guilty of a crime if he has acted with a state of mind called "recklessness...
Monday, January 23, 2006

Illegal acquittals

›
Objections to the power proposed to be given to the prosecution, in some circumstances, to appeal against acquittals, are usually advanced o...
Friday, January 20, 2006

Three major themes

›
Three topics of general interest were touched upon by the Privy Council in Grant v R (Jamaica) [2006] UKPC 2 (17 January 2006): (1) the int...
Monday, January 16, 2006

Revising history

›
Where a trial has, in the opinion of an appellate court, involved a miscarriage of justice, the appeal against conviction should be allowed,...
Thursday, December 22, 2005

The more, the merrier

›
How straight-laced are Quebeckers? One would have thought this was a silly-season question. And yes, the people of Quebec are called Quebeck...
Monday, December 19, 2005

The evil that men think

›
If I am offended, not by what I see a person doing, but by what I think he might do later, have I observed behaviour that the criminal law c...
Friday, December 16, 2005

Proof or believability

›
One of the difficult distinctions in the law of evidence concerns the use of statements made by a witness on a previous occasion to contradi...
Monday, December 12, 2005

The "rule" in Browne v Dunn

›
Can the rules of evidence, that have been designed to ensure fairness, be ignored if the judge feels that it would be more fair to ignore th...
1 comment:
Friday, December 09, 2005

How civilised are we?

›
What use of torture is tolerable? More precisely, what risk that evidence tendered to the court was obtained by torture is tolerable? The Ho...
Monday, December 05, 2005

Synchronicity

›
The House of Lords and the New Zealand Supreme Court decided similar cases on 1 December 2005. Each concerned the rights of persons who had ...
Thursday, November 24, 2005

Bain, again

›
Supporters of David Bain will, no doubt, be studying Mallard v R [2005] HCA 68 (15 November 2005). Both started as petitions for the exerci...
Wednesday, November 16, 2005

Death and certainty

›
How much formalism is too much? In interpreting statutes, to resolve an ambiguity, judges may focus on the context of the problematic phrase...
Monday, November 07, 2005

Dealing with vagueness

›
Rights may be expressed in unavoidably vague terms, so how can they be said to be absolute? An example is the right not to be subjected to i...
Tuesday, October 25, 2005

Whose verdict?

›
Appeals against conviction require consideration of whether there has been a substantial miscarriage of justice. This, in turn, can raise tw...
Tuesday, October 11, 2005

Helpful Acts?

›
Legislation can make the law absurdly complicated. In Tabe v R [2005] HCA 59 (6 October 2005) Australia’s senior judges split 3 – 2 on an i...