Thursday, June 02, 2022

Prosecutor's fallacy and conditional probability reasoning: R v Lyttle [2022] NZCA 52

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The prosecutor’s fallacy is an error in reasoning that can be very difficult to notice. It came to attention recently in what is now our lea...
Wednesday, May 18, 2022

Overruling "final" decisions: Chandler v The State (Trinidad and Tobago) No 2) [2022] UKPC 19

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You can’t read Chandler v The State (Trinidad and Tobago) (No 2) [2022] UKPC 19 without thinking of the anticipated overruling by the Suprem...
Sunday, May 15, 2022

Judicial responses to rights-infringing legislation: Brown v R, 2022 SCC 18

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In Brown v R , 2022 SCC 18 (May 13, 2022) the Supreme Court of Canada declared  unconstitutional, and of no force or effect, s 33.1 of the...
Wednesday, April 27, 2022

Unfair trial or not unfair trial? Hewey v R (Bermuda) [2022] UKPC 12

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Was the trial that was the subject of the appeal in Hewey v R (Bermuda) [2022] UKPC 12   unfair? The judge’s summing up to the jury had not ...
Friday, April 22, 2022

A lawful but contextually unreasonable search: R v Tim, 2022 SCC 12

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For an example of circumstances where a lawful search was in breach of the defendant’s right not to be unreasonably searched, see R v Tim , ...
Monday, April 18, 2022

Political laughter at law: extradition, risk of torture and trial unfairness, and Minister of Justice v Kim [2022] NZSC 44

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I must admit that I had a good laugh at the brilliant cartoon by the gifted Sharon Murdoch, published yesterday in Stuff (see the cartoon da...
Wednesday, April 13, 2022

Proximity and fishing in safety searches upon arrest: R v Stairs, 2022 SCC 11

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Attempts to codify the law - that is, to capture the whole of the law on a given subject in a statute so that it is not necessary to refer t...
Saturday, April 09, 2022

Witness credibility, absence of cross-examination, and trial fairness: R v Samaniego, 2022 SCC 9

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Reading R v Samaniego, 2022 SCC 9 (March 25, 2022), and its excellent summary by Henna Mohan at thecourt.ca , might leave you wondering a...
Saturday, March 12, 2022

Statutory interpretation, extraneous materials, the rule of lenity: Wooden v United States No 20-5279, March 7, 2022

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Judicial approaches to statutory interpretation can be contentious, even among judges of a final appellate court. This is illustrated in a r...
Tuesday, February 01, 2022

Waving the flag: Pwr v DPP [2022] UKSC 2

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Flag waving during a demonstration in public in central London was an offence in Pwr v DPP [2022] UKSC 2 (26 January 2022). Legislation, d...
Thursday, December 09, 2021

Mistakes that are not innocent mistakes: Bell v Tasmania [2021] HCA 42

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Criminal responsibility is not usually imposed on people who are in no way morally blameworthy. At least, that is so for serious crimes as o...
Wednesday, November 10, 2021

Conviction appeals and judicial differences - lack of unanimous appellate verdict in a final appeal

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In most appeals against conviction the focus is, to use the broadest of non-technical descriptions, on errors and on the soundness of the ve...
Friday, October 08, 2021

Rights consistent reading-down of the three strikes sentencing legislation

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Our Supreme Court has allowed the appeal against sentence in the Fitzgerald case which I mentioned here on July 17, 2020: Fitzgerald v R ...