Wednesday, October 19, 2022

Failure to caution a suspect: R v Tessier, 2022 SCC 35

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The Supreme Court of Canada’s decision in R v Tessier , 2022 SCC 35 (14 October 2022) concerns the admissibility consequences of a statemen...
Tuesday, October 11, 2022

Three fundamentals of evidence law: R v Schneider, 2022 SCC 34

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You wouldn’t expect to find huge differences in the law of evidence between common law legal systems, even where legislation has replaced th...
Friday, October 07, 2022

Tikanga Māori and the common law of New Zealand: Ellis v R (Continuance) [2022] NZSC 114

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Today our Supreme Court released two decisions in the Ellis case. The case concerns the convictions in 1993 of the appellant for sexual offe...
Wednesday, September 14, 2022

Attempting to have possession of a controlled drug

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If legislation [1]   has omitted to provide for an offence of procuring a controlled drug for supply, and so also omitted an offence of att...
Thursday, September 08, 2022

The principle underlying judicial recognition of retrospective removal of a defence: Stephens v The Queen [2022] HCA 31

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If the legislature changes the law by removing a defence, and that change is not specified to apply to trials that have commenced and not be...
Wednesday, August 24, 2022

Identifying unlawful benefit

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Calculating a person’s unlawfully obtained benefit from criminal activity can raise some complicated issues. Suppose a lotto ticket has been...
Wednesday, August 10, 2022

How much of the work should a final appeal court do? Two remittal and retrial decisions of the High Court of Australia.

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Sometimes one wonders why an ultimate appeal court orders new trials or refers issues back to lower courts. Why not decide cases finally, si...
Sunday, July 31, 2022

Arbitrary detention, right to legal advice, a 5-4 split on final appeal: R v Lafrance, 2022 SCC 32

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The first thing that strikes one on reading R v Lafrance , 2022 SCC 32 (22 July 2022), is that the Supreme Court of Canada was divided 5-4....
Thursday, July 07, 2022

Truth-seeking? R v J.J., 2022 SCC 28

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I don’t know how well the person who determines the wording of Canada’s federal laws speaks English. Look at this: “(3) The judge shall, as ...
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 ...