Thursday, June 26, 2014

Privacy and electronic records

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At common law a cell phone, seized when a person is arrested, cannot be searched. I say “at common law” because the rule may be modified, s...
Friday, June 20, 2014

Who shall yield? Recovering proceeds of crime from joint offenders.

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Forfeiture orders, to recover benefits obtained by crime, may be issued against each participant in the offending for the full amount of th...
Thursday, June 19, 2014

Beyond the law: the kindness of strangers

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At common law, once a defendant has been convicted, disclosure obligations change. This is because of the public interest, particularly the...
Friday, June 13, 2014

IQ and intellectual disability

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One of the things about the death penalty is that the Supreme Court of the United States has held that no legitimate penological purpose is...
Tuesday, June 10, 2014

The prosecutor's discretion

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Judicial interference with decisions about what submissions a party to litigation should make will occur only rarely, to prevent an abuse o...
Wednesday, May 21, 2014

When the right hand unfairly finds out what the left has been doing

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If something can go wrong, it will, and there can't be many criminal defence lawyers who will be surprised that there has been a glitch ...
Sunday, May 18, 2014

Harmless lawbreaking by judges

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There are times when judges fail to obey the law, in the conduct of trials, but that failure doesn't matter. For example, in Stout v R ...
Saturday, May 17, 2014

Assessing reasonableness of suspicion

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When can a tip-off provide the police with reasonable grounds to suspect that an offence has been committed?  If the informant is not kn...
Wednesday, May 14, 2014

Dangerous indifference

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Recklessness as to whether a complainant is consenting to sexual activity is not the same as recklessness as to why the complainant isn'...
Saturday, May 03, 2014

Paying for doing harm

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For discussion of how to determine the amount of restitution (often in criminal law called reparation) a defendant should pay a victim who...
Friday, April 18, 2014

Article by Lord Phillips: Closed Material

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As a special favour to yourself – a reward for a virtuous life – read the article by Lord Phillips on the way courts accommodate the need t...
Thursday, April 17, 2014

Fairness and contempt proceedings

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Procedural fairness in contempt proceedings is the topic of general interest in Dhooharika v The Director of Public Prosecutions (Mauritiu...
Friday, April 04, 2014

Points to file away ...

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To do an act “with” the defendant Policy was an important consideration in interpreting the phrase “to do an indecent act with or upon” t...
Friday, March 28, 2014

They say we can't, but we say we can! Fairness trumps logic in the Privy Council.

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Every judge dislikes constraints on jurisdiction that impede justice. One can be confident about that. In our legal system – and perhap...
Saturday, March 22, 2014

Can technology make extradition for trial unnecessary?

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If you need clarification of disclosure obligations in the context of extradition proceedings involving the “record of case” procedure, Dot...
Saturday, March 15, 2014

Have you tried marine biology?

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I’m told that there are some people who need to use little untruths to advance their chance of romantic success. The most famous exampl...
Sunday, March 09, 2014

My goodness! Is that a gun?

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For what would be accepted in the common law world as a conventional analysis of secondary liability insofar as it applied to the facts of R...
Thursday, March 06, 2014

Hidden defences and concealed charges

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Defence lawyers are familiar with the difficulty of deciding how to make the best of one defence while not losing a fall-back defence in th...