Keeping the bastards honest


Greg Curtin, member of the NSW bar council who last year agitated for silk selection reform, reviews the new process … A revised protocol supported by “conventions” should made the system more performance focussed

Further and better delays ... Sleepers awake ... Unfinished case too old to be remembered ... Chop-chop ... Circus Court derailment ... Clock running slow ... Justice Jenni's unhurried rescue of online trader ... Sliding scale of delays ... From our Court Linesman ... Read more >>
The Empire Strikes Back ... Uday Moloch anointed to “protect the English speaking world” … Latest word on “genocide” … Bring out the No-Doz – The Mad Monk scribbles for Substack … Church litigation – a new front to be tested by victims of predatory priests ... Read more >>
Know one, purl one ... Iron Lady of legal rectitude endorses Gageler ... The chief justice wants judges on the straight and narrow ... The cardboard cutout model of legislative supremacy ... The evils of judicial activism ... Procrustes on the dance floor with the Legislative-Judicial Foxtrot ... Read more >>
Sold out ... Auction of personal effects of the late NSW Supremo Justice Robert Shallcross Hulme and Mrs Suzette Hulme ... Everything under the hammer ... Dalton figurine of the judge ... Meccano set ... Assorted bed linen ... Claytons wine ... Plastic kitchen containers ... Toby jug ... Whisky glasses ... Picture of a French advocat kissing his client ... 165 lots >>
Berlusconi's dream world ... Revenge politics in Italy ... Independence of prosecutors under attack ... Constitutional assault ... The years of lead ... Investigations reopened into old murders ... High drama at Milan's Leoncavallo ... Rome correspondent Silvana Olivetti reports ... Read more >>
"I think very good. And by the way, right there, you see all the trucks, they just started construction of the new ballroom for the White House, which is something they've been trying to get, as you know, for about 150 years, and it's going to be a beauty. It'll be an absolutely magnificent structure. And I just see all the trucks. We just started so it'll get done very nicely and it'll be one of the best anywhere in the world, actually. Thank you very much."
President Trump, asked by a reporter at the White House how he was holding up personally after the loss of his friend Charlie Kirk ... September 11, 2025 ... Read more flatulence ...
Schmoozing and betrayal ... Judge Water Softener rides into Integrityville mounted high on his horse ... Judicial review of corruption finding ... Intriguing submissions ... Unprecedented assistance to morals monitor ... The scale of the sub-rosa intrigue ... Plenty to think about ... Ginger Snatch reports ... Read more >>
The plague of amnesia ... Memory and its failures ... Remembering to forget things ... Failure to take account of remissions in sentencing ... Relevant memories of experienced and inexperience judges ... An experienced judge writes ... Justinian's Archive, November 12, 2004 ... Read more >>
Greg Curtin, member of the NSW bar council who last year agitated for silk selection reform, reviews the new process … A revised protocol supported by “conventions” should made the system more performance focussed
London calling … Disclosing electronic documents … Costs have travelled north in the wake of the Woolf reforms … Less willingness to order discovery … New gardening broom in Birmingham tries to keep the lid on the cost of disclosure … Leverhulme reports
Most of the army of political reporters in Canberra have been asleep … Caught by surprise at the festering about Rudd within the caucus … Most press gallery hacks prefer to lecture their readers and the pollies, rather than shake down hot stories
Great new book on the judge-lawyer bias … Tom Bingham’s tome should be binned … So too Ken Crispen’s … Lawyer Theodore Kubicek’s work is spot on … Not to mention Our Corrupt Legal System ... And Graham Perkin was wrong about everything that mattered … Whitton at large
The US Supreme Court criminalises the advocacy of non-violent activity … First Amendment backflip … National security trumps free speech … Roger Fitch reports from Washington
Judge Keating’s list of new workers comp arbitrators refined by AG … Well known hands get the gigs … Parliamentary flourishes out the window
Fresh crop of penguins graduate from bar practice course in Sydney … Early training to defend the untenable … Drinkers, gossipers, opiners, whippersnappers and obsessives released into the community … Our blogger Fledgling reports
Modifying Miranda ... Torture popping up everywhere ... Medicos in the war crime frame ... How the government switches the constitution on and off ... Ballet dancing detainees could be swapped ... Our Man in Washington reports
The study of law is rather like the study of theology … Waffly concepts abound – like “judicial independence” ... Tulkinghorn argues that law schools have about as much place in a modern university as schools of fencing or dancing
Mullettgate … Fontainebleaugate … The Australian’s case against Victoria’s chief copper Simon Overland … But there is a hole in the key allegation … A few more facts would help … In the meantime enjoy the relentless tub thumping
Former Clayton Utz solicitor sues the firm for defamation … Email sent at the direction of former Law Soc prez Joe Catanzariti … Partners argue that proposed amended statement of claim “seriously prejudices them” ... Justice Simpson says firm’s submission is “inapt”
Pious Cant, trapped at Big Law in Tokyo, examines frottage brought on by the excitement of high-end economic activity … Making obscene amounts of money increases the libidinous quotient … The BBC is to blame
The condition of bar readers eight years ago ... Fresh crop of penguins … Early training to defend the untenable … Drinkers, gossipers, opiners, whippersnappers and obsessives released into the community … From the archive, June 2010 ... Our blogger Fledgling reports
The aid flotilla attempting to breach the Israeli blockade is just the latest in the Gaza protest movement … Australian lawyers Ann Cunningham and Stephen Keim report on the Cairo protests earlier this year … US Embassy showed it has the muscle to halt violence by Egyptian security forces
Our Man in Washington ... The cynical view is that Elena Kagan suits Prez Obama’s concepts of executive power … Latest thinking from the US Supremes on juvenile and sex offenders … Foreign detainees have no habeas rights … Assassination by drone and the law of war … Roger Fitch reports
A legal profession regulated by layers not lawyers … Independence in tatters … Judges and trade union reps rise-up against proposed national reforms … The English legal system remains strangely unthreatened by non-lawyer regulators … Samantha Bowers reports
Injured workers seem to have multiple bites of the cherry until they stumble on the “right” opinion from a medical panel … Barry Lane’s eyes are watering as he contemplates the cost to the long suffering taxpayer … Time for some parliamentary penmanship
Application of contemporary standards to use of the F%#*-word in public … Context is everything in coming to grips with indecent language … Justice Beach shows the way in Easter egg drama
The tricky business of making doctors liable for their negligence, while exempting lawyers from liability for theirs … With the High Court on side, how can the lawyers lose? ... Tulkinghorn teases the issue
Portia attended the big chinwag in Melbourne on mediation andnon-adversarial justice … She was singularly unimpressed … It put her inmind of a Billy Graham evangelical meeting … What’s happened to the old lovefor the godless adversarial joust?