I thought I was a bit of an arachnophobe, but clearly I’m not as bad as I thought, because I found this virtual spider quite endearing. You can pull it around by the leg or feed it. Read more »
I thought I was a bit of an arachnophobe, but clearly I’m not as bad as I thought, because I found this virtual spider quite endearing. You can pull it around by the leg or feed it. Read more »
A landmark case is being brought against a UK man in relation to a blog post allegedly authored by him which details his fantasy of the kidnap, rape, torture and murder of an all-girl band called Girls Aloud. I must say that I’d never heard of the band before (indeed, Wikipedia says their efforts to crack the Australian market were unsuccessful). Read more »
The law firm for which I worked when I had my daughter did not have paid maternity leave unless you were a partner. As far as I know, only one woman ever met that hurdle. It is a really short-sighted position to take when you are a profitable business with a pretty good turnover. I think that if I had received maternity leave, I would have returned to the firm, at least for a year. I would have felt a moral obligation to return because they had supported me financially while I was off work. I would also have felt that my contribution was valued, and that the firm wanted me back. Read more »
There were two depressing reports in The Australian today which indicate that female barristers are not treated equally compared to male barristers in terms of pay and briefing practices. Read more »
Trust lawyers are taught every trust must have an “object”: that is, someone who benefits from the trust. In some limited circumstances, the object may be a purpose rather than a person (generally charitable, but in rare circumstances, non-charitable). Read more »
Regular commenter fatfingers draws my attention to this little expectoration from within Cowards’ Castle’s protective walls. Read more »
The bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers investment bank will (naturally) have ramifications for those Australian investors who had dealings with the Australian arm of the bank. Read more »
like a lawyer scorned by other lawyers.
Former Queensland Chief Magistrate Di Fingleton was charged and convicted of an offence pursuant to s 119B of the Criminal Code which prohibits unlawful retaliation against a witness. Ms Fingleton was first subject to a Crime and Misconduct Commission investigation, then a committal hearing and two criminal trials and an appeal to the Queensland Court of Appeal. Ultimately, she served a gaol sentence in relation to the offence. Read more »
Joe Cambria is a trader who has been watching blood spread all over the stockmarket floor during the last week. In the UK, short-selling of financial stocks has now been banned, although this move doesn’t address the fundamental problem of building wealth on debt. Joe has also spotted another problem - the increased reliance on financial modelling. Graphic is by DeusExMacintosh.
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The mother of a very gifted child is suing the Queensland Government for failing to enrol her 9 year old daughter in Year 8 at a Queensland public school. There is no minimum age for enrollment in high school, but the Queensland Government cited fears over the girl’s social development as a reason for refusing the mother’s request. The case has now gone up to the High Court. Read more »
Before I get to DeusExMacintosh’s latest funny, a couple of announcements: regular commenter John Hasenkam now has his own blog (mainly matters medical), while another regular, Pavlov’s Cat, has moved blogs (although she’s still with blogger, natch). A nice feature of her new home is the series of rotating headers featuring what is quite possibly the most beautiful tortoiseshell cat EVAH. Read more »
I’ve written before on student evaluations, with a bit of a giggle about some of the answers I get.
As I have said, my worry has always been that the kinds of questions asked are too vague, and the responses don’t really reflect, well…anything: Read more »
We are indebted to DeusExMacintosh for her comedic Photoshoppery…
I don’t think that I realised that the phenomenon of Gentlemen’s Clubs still existed until I’d left university and started work. A male academic friend was invited to lunch at a particular club recently, and told me it was full of judges and barristers and prominent business men. I was fascinated by the concept: social clubs to which women could not be invited as members, and where prominent businessmen and lawyers met. It just seemed so antiquated. Then it struck me that this was a concentration of power which I would never be able to access. Read more »
I don’t think that I realised that the phenomenon of Gentlemen’s Clubs still existed until I’d left university and started work. A male academic friend was invited to lunch at a particular club recently, and told me it was full of judges and barristers and prominent business men. I was fascinated by the concept: social clubs to which women could not be invited as members, and where prominent businessmen and lawyers met. It just seemed so antiquated. Then it struck me that this was a concentration of power which I would never be able to access. Read more »
It may not be the done thing to sing advertising’s praises to the skies, but this is simply superb. Read more »
A friend from uni dubbed me “illjury prone”: meaning illness and injury prone. I can’t really defend myself from this claim with any confidence. I do have a tendency to get into scrapes of one sort and another. Read more »
Recently, a discussion about manners has developed in the comments thread of SL’s latest post on Sarah Palin. And so my interest was sparked by a post on The Age’s Essential Baby blog with regard to modern children and their lack of manners. Read more »
It seems former Australian Test cricketer Craig McDermott is in a spot of bother because of his involvement with failed property investment company Bridgecorp Finance. McDermott was loaned $19.6M by Bridgecorp to aid his Gold Coast property development business. Read more »
Well, the Large Hadron Collider hasn’t sent us all into a black hole (yay!), and Channel 4 news once again drags out the funnies to celebrate. Good science reporting from the MSM is rare; MSM science reporting that (a) respects the science and (b) takes the piss out of the MSM is even rarer. Props to Channel 4 - and to our readers, enjoy! Read more »
J.K. Rowling has succeeded at first instance in her copyright infringement case against RDR publishers and Stephen Vander Ark for their proposed Harry Potter Lexicon. I have mentioned this case earlier. Read more »
One of the things which disturbed me about the Beijing Olympics was the lack of humour in any of the proceedings. Once a society no longer has a capacity to laugh at itself, I think it’s an indicator that there is something seriously wrong. Read more »
When one is young and naive, criminal law seems really exciting. But ultimately, I ended up going down the private law path. This is what happened the day I decided criminal law was not for me. Read more »
One of the problems I found with my law degree is that I was never quite sure why I received the marks I did. So I am very sympathetic to students when they consult me for exam feedback. I go through the exam with the student and point out where they lost marks, and what could have been done better. Usually, with hypothetical problems, if the student actually studied, it’s a question of timing (student ran out of time) or emphasis (student emphasised issues which were not relevant). Read more »
I thought that there was nothing I hated more than being put on hold for ages when trying to call a service provider.
Now I have worked out that there is something I hate more. It’s a new phenomenon - a computer voice that asks you questions about what you want and tries to answer your questions. “It sounds like you want customer services,” says the fruity disembodied voice. “Is that right? Say Yes or No.” Read more »
Sorry folks, it’s me. These days when I install Wordpress I do a checkout from the main source repository, which has the nice property that I need only run a single command to update the exact files which change from version to version without having to do anything chancy.
At least, that’s the theory. It’s not working at the moment, so you may see the site appear and disappear a bit today.
Update: No dice. Looks like I’d have to reinstall from scratch to get it to work, so I’m going to put that off for the moment.
Seinfeld has already been used to illustrate competition law in the US. But it seems he can also be used to describe contractual good faith! Read more »
Nicholas Gruen has written an interesting piece over at Club Troppo about reforms to litigation. Go and have a read. I have long thought some kind of hybrid between adversarial and inquisitorial might be the way to go.
…you’ll notice this notice is not worth noticing.
This story made me laugh. It concerns the tale of two frustrated creative writing students on a mission to save the US from bad grammar. Unfortunately, the tale ends in tragedy:
A campaign by two grammar vigilantes to correct mistakes on signs across America has come to an abrupt end after they were charged with vandalism for trying to rectify a spelling error at the Grand Canyon.
Read more »
More news funnies, courtesy our friends at Channel 4. And two Chinese grandmothers with a terrific attitude. Read more »
It’s pretty pathetic that Melbourne man Menachem Vorchheimer has had to engage in a two-year legal battle to get the Victoria Police to admit that the racial attack he suffered was inappropriate. Read more »
Ages ago, Tim Watts tagged me for this exercise in owning up.
This time it’s the five most embarrassing musical moments that still happen to be on one’s iPod (I do recommend Tim’s version, too - he has some real toe-curlers). I’m older than Tim, so I’ve had a few extra years to accumulate music that others may find deeply worrying. This takes in, of course, the entire decade of the 1980s. That said, the 1980s is in the process of musical rehabilitation, so maybe some of this stuff will make a comeback… Read more »
I wrote a post last year about a couple who were suing their obstetrician because the birth mother was implanted with two embryos rather than one. A reader has alerted me to the fact that a decision was handed down while I was conferencing in Singapore: so here we go, a belated update. Read more »
I’m sure my daughter looks like a right little yuppie. She goes through the shops shouting, “I want a Babycino!” and people smile. But this is totally misleading. She explained to my mother the other day: “Mummy calls Babycinos marshmallows, but I call them Babycinos.” The general tone was that Mummy is an idiot. Read more »
As someone who is interested in restitution and gain-based remedies, I couldn’t help but be interested in this story about an actor trying to recover some of the profits from the makers of the TV series Skippy. Read more »
One of the commenters over at Tim Blair’s called this bloke a ‘ponce’, which in British parlance has a pretty specific meaning: living off the immoral earnings of a woman. Read more »
I’m going to have to go on maternity leave early. Today was my last day of teaching. That’s the thing; pregnancy is not an illness, but it does put a lot of strain on the body, and it’s undeniable that it affects one’s capacity to work effectively. I had to finish early last time too, but I thought things were going better this time. My body had other ideas, and has just mutinied. Perhaps I was a little crazy taking on full time study, part time work and full time mothering all at once. Read more »
I’m one of those people who has grand pretentions towards being orderly. One day. One day, I will invent a system which enables me to keep everything orderly and neat. However, I must confess that this has always been theory only. As I have confessed in an earlier post, I am a notorious stacker of paper on desks. In other words, my desk is invariably messy, no matter what filing system I employ. Presently, the pile of papers to read for my thesis is divided into two piles. Read more »
I mentioned the case of Sydney law firm Keddies in passing in a post on solicitors’ work hours. Keddies is being sued by former clients who allege that they were overcharged (including being charged for reading “thank you” letters. The SMH reports: Read more »
We’ve just been doing our tax returns in the Eagle household, including looking at our HECS debt. The year our daughter was born, we found out that HECS had not been taken out of my husband’s salary as we went, and so we owed a debt to the tax office. Whoops. That was a shock to the system. But luckily, my husband didn’t begin a Law degree in the last 10 years or so - we would have had an even bigger shock then. Read more »
…At the expense of Gordon Brown and the rubbery-faced homunculus who wants his job even more than David Cameron. Artwork by DeusExMacinstosh.
When John McCain picked Sarah Palin as his running-mate, there was immediate controversy over her opposition to abortion. Read more »
I wrote a post earlier on the Harry Potter/Hari Puttar dispute between Warner Bros and Bollywood. Via cearta.ie, I see that the BBC reports that Warner Bros has failed in its case against the Hari Puttar filmmakers: Read more »
Today I’ve officially got 6 weeks to go until Baby is born. I’d know it wasn’t too far off anyway, because I have been overtaken by some very strange impulses…namely, cleaning impulses. Usually I’m not a very tidy person. Read more »
[Joe Cambria - our in-house trader - takes a hard look at the arguments swirling around government intervention and buyouts in the recent finance fooferaw. It's not as simple as it looks...]
No one needs another blog post telling him or her what’s been going on in the financial markets. I also don’t need to tell anyone about the caning the Fed and the US Treasury have been getting for the “bailouts” (AIG was a nationalization etc) and how the US is practicing ’socialism’. Read more »
Apparently lenders are leaving the low-doc loan market in droves. Hurrah for that! As someone who worked for lenders and repossessed houses on their behalf, I saw loans that should never have been made in the first place. Low-doc loans are irresponsible: by the very nature of the beast, the borrower is likely to have difficulty repaying.
In 1967, teacher Ron Jones conducted his very own Stanford Prison Experiment. Fed up with ‘yeah, whatever’ and the ever popular ‘but we wouldn’t do that’ student responses in his classes on fascism and Nazism, he introduced autocracy to his 15 year-old charges by doing it. He figured he’d need about a fortnight to get enough of the class interested in order to make the experiment worthwhile. In the end, he had to jettison the whole thing after a week. The Third Wave was simply out of control. Read more »
Over at Club Troppo, Jacques (our redoubtable admin) informs us that a bunch of not very nice internet types have hacked Sarah Palin’s Yahoo email account. This seems to be part of an ongoing attempt to prove that she improperly conducted government business using her private account, although it appears that there was nothing to find - pictures of her kids, and some emails back and forth with a staffer expressing concern over attacks in the media. The more serious issue is the ease with which her account was hacked. Read more »
Before I get to DeusExMacintosh’s latest funny, a couple of announcements: regular commenter John Hasenkam now has his own blog (mainly matters medical), while another regular, Pavlov’s Cat, has moved blogs (although she’s still with blogger, natch). A nice feature of her new home is the series of rotating headers featuring what is quite possibly the most beautiful tortoiseshell cat EVAH. Read more »
I’ve written before on student evaluations, with a bit of a giggle about some of the answers I get.
As I have said, my worry has always been that the kinds of questions asked are too vague, and the responses don’t really reflect, well…anything: Read more »
We are indebted to DeusExMacintosh for her comedic Photoshoppery…
I don’t think that I realised that the phenomenon of Gentlemen’s Clubs still existed until I’d left university and started work. A male academic friend was invited to lunch at a particular club recently, and told me it was full of judges and barristers and prominent business men. I was fascinated by the concept: clubs to which women could not be invited as members, and where prominent businessmen and lawyers met. It just seemed so antiquated. Then it struck me that this was a concentration of power which I would never be able to access. Read more »
It may not be the done thing to sing advertising’s praises to the skies, but this is simply superb. Read more »
A friend from uni dubbed me “illjury prone”: meaning illness and injury prone. I can’t really defend myself from this claim with any confidence. I do have a tendency to get into scrapes of one sort and another. Read more »
Recently, a discussion about manners has developed in the comments thread of SL’s latest post on Sarah Palin. And so my interest was sparked by a post on The Age’s Essential Baby blog with regard to modern children and their lack of manners. Read more »
It seems former Australian Test cricketer Craig McDermott is in a spot of bother because of his involvement with failed property investment company Bridgecorp Finance. McDermott was loaned $19.6M by Bridgecorp to aid his Gold Coast property development business. Read more »
Well, the Large Hadron Collider hasn’t sent us all into a black hole (yay!), and Channel 4 news once again drags out the funnies to celebrate. Good science reporting from the MSM is rare; MSM science reporting that (a) respects the science and (b) takes the piss out of the MSM is even rarer. Props to Channel 4 - and to our readers, enjoy! Read more »
J.K. Rowling has succeeded at first instance in her copyright infringement case against RDR publishers and Stephen Vander Ark for their proposed Harry Potter Lexicon. I have mentioned this case earlier. Read more »
Round 1 ended with Palin ahead on points after Media was subjected to a standing eight count. Round 2 is now underway, with Media trying some new strategies. These include the Not Quite Puff Piece (courtesy the NYT) and the Policy by the Back Door piece (courtesy the Democratic Party itself). Read more »
One of the guys I dated way back when came from an ethnic group with more traditional gender role divisions than mainstream Australian society. He wasn’t notably sexist, although he had characteristics one associates with the nicer conservatives - opening car doors, not swearing in front of women, not butting in when someone else was speaking, generally ‘looking out’ for the weak. I got to know his family - and his younger sister - pretty well over the years. Read more »
Last week, I got a letter from a postgraduate student at Melbourne University. She’s conducting research into my novel, The Hand that Signed the Paper, and wanted me to answer some questions. To date I haven’t replied, which seems churlish of me, but I get these requests - on average - about once a month, and the amount of detail they want is often considerable. It’s fair to say the quality of my responses vary, too, although they’ve crystallized over the years. Read more »
A friend sent me an article from the Centre for Policy and Development entitled “Why Can’t Kevin Rudd Make Proper Legal Policy?” The title is a little misleading, as the piece doesn’t really deal with KRudd or specific instances of failure to make legal policy. Read more »
… when the best golfer in the world is black, the best rapper in the world is white, and the best basketballer in the world is Chinese.
And when the Republicans endorse a working-class woman for Vice President (not to mention all the other firsts in this topsy-turvy election year).
Obviously, that headline can be taken any one of a number of ways, and if you’re recently divorced, it may even inspire you to find the homo economicus who wrote it (me) and burn my house down. So - with that in mind - I’ll just ask you to hear me out, and see where the argument leads. Read more »
Anyone who loves restitution law will have been aware for some time of the Restitution Legal Resource page, maintained by Steve Hedley. It’s a fantastic resource for restitution scholars. Read more »
I think my response and reading of Germaine Greer’s piece On Rage has emanated from my own feelings about rage. So I thought I might explore rage myself. Read more »
It’s commonly observed that wealthy countries do more to protect the environment than poor ones, which seems fair enough - poor countries are poor, and probably have other priorities. However, even when those poor countries start to become rich, they still don’t do much for the environment. Indeed, they have to become ‘almost rich’ before environmental issues even start to register (or they have to host the Olympic Games, although that - I suspect - is something of an economic ‘black swan’). Read more »
Bryony Shaw wins unexpected medal, drops F-Bomb on national telly, BBC apologises. It doesn’t get any funnier. Read more »
Warning for the faint hearted - don’t read on if you are feeling squeamish. This tale is about how, unfortunately, I had to broach the subject of mortality and death with my daughter today. Read more »
Given that a recent comment thread on Germaine Greer turned into a discussion of dyslexia and learning difficulties, I thought I might start off a direct discussion of learning difficulties in a post. I just read a book called The Brain that Changes Itself, which discusses neuroplasticity and the capacity of the brain to change. It had a number of interesting chapters on methods of counteracting learning difficulties and dyslexia. It seems that people can undergo brain exercises which teach their brains to operate differently. Read more »
I read Tracee Hutchison’s critique of Germaine Greer, and although I often don’t agree with Hutchison, this time, I think she’s spot on in her criticisms of Greer. In Greer’s essay On Rage, she says: Read more »
Then came there two women, that were harlots, unto the king, and stood before him.
And the one woman said, O my lord, I and this woman dwell in one house; and I was delivered of a child with her in the house.
And it came to pass the third day after that I was delivered, that this woman was delivered also: and we were together; there was no stranger with us in the house, save we two in the house.
And this woman’s child died in the night; because she overlaid it.
Read more »
I was interested to skim-read the ALRC’s recently released report on Privacy Laws (reported in The Age here). No, I can’t honestly claim to have read the entire thing, but I did read the executive summary and selected sections. Read more »
Well, it seems the people who organised the Olympic Opening Ceremony learned a few things from Milli Vanilli, but have managed to get themselves something of a Singin’ in the Rain reaction. It turns out that Lin Miaoke, the pretty nine-year-old who charmed the world when she sang ‘Ode to the Motherland’ wasn’t just lip-syncing (which was obvious enough, to be fair). Read more »
As far as I’m aware, Mike Shinoda’s Linkin Park side project (Fort Minor) never made a clip for this highly unusual ‘family rap’, so a group of amateurs made one on the sly. As with a few of our regular commenters, rap’s not a genre I warm to, but this manages to transcend the form in all sorts of interesting ways. Read more »
