Category: Civil Law

For a few hours around midnight last Wednesday, Cricket Australia projected an image onto the Big Ben clock tower which contained the message “Don’t forget to pack the urn”, referring to the forthcoming Ashes series in Australia. (It was a clear allusion to the English Cricket Board’s projection in 2008 of a similar image onto… Read more →

Saw this chuckleworthy piece over at Overlawyered: A team of researchers led by Richard Gun, visiting research fellow at Adelaide University, ‘has found patients who engage a lawyer after receiving their injury are five times less likely ever to return to work.’ They also appear to suffer more pain and for longer periods than accident… Read more →

Two recent news stories highlight the development of French internet policy. France is traditionally billed as the ‘safe haven’ of P2P users — portrayed as having a liberal, permissive copyright regime and consumer-friendly anti-circumvention laws. The first story certainly confirms this view. The French Parliament is considering legislation that would mandate Apple to open its… Read more →

The New South Wales Department of Lands has announced that its transition to an electronic register of land titles will be complete by December 2006. The transition is a massive undertaking, involving the digitisation of some 66 000 paper certificates of title and issuance of transaction access credentials to several thousand conveyancers and legal professionals. From… Read more →

See here for a particularly egregious example of a court filing that has not been properly proofread. Compare, in particular, the phrase ‘disc herniation’ on p 2 with its corresponding incarnation on p 1. Whether malapropism, typographical error, or simply the joke of a bored clerk, the attorneys concerned must be considerably embarrassed. Given that such errors… Read more →

The Australian is reporting that a complaint has been received about three Clayton Utz lawyers involved in the Sharman License Holdings (‘SLH’) trial, acting for the developer of the popular KaZaa file-sharing software. According to the complaint, the lawyers are alleged to have influenced the testimony of an expert witness. The expert was required to… Read more →

The ABC is reporting that doctors could be sued for being late to appointments, according to several lawyers: The Downs and South West Law Association’s Darryl Cox says some people are waiting up to an hour for appointments, costing them time and money and doctors need to stop over-booking. “If it’s the case that the… Read more →

‘Cyberlaw’ is a phrase I have adopted to signify the application of jurisprudence in any electronic context. As a descriptive label, it has since been succeeded as the buzzword of choice by such phrases as ‘communications law’, ‘IT law’ and, more recently, plain old ‘internet law’ — as well as its more specific sub-branches, including… Read more →

Basically every private law subject I’ve taken in law school has had something to say about the Ford Pinto case. Various movements in legal theory have referred to it when discussing product liability, consumer rights, the moral turpitude of law and economics, legal ethics (including the procedural pathologies of adversarial advocacy and other annoying alliterations),… Read more →

According to an article in The Age, ‘[a] website blunder by Dell Australia has allowed hundreds of customers to order 250GB hard drives for AUD$8.80, almost [$200] less than the actual price. According to posts on the Whirlpool and Overclockers Australia online forums, customers successfully ordered the hard drives online from 8.00am on Monday until… Read more →