Rich and colourful parade of judiciary in Mt Hagen … Thousands of cases languish … Remorseless giant LexisNexis swallows another case law analytics business … Statelessness gets a handout … Department of Immigration’s unique interpretation of the Freedom of Information Act … Lawyer’s defamation appeal bites the dust
Despite the steamy conditions, judges in PNG just love their heavy robes. Have a look at the ceremony for the opening of the law year in Mt Hagen, in the western highlands.
Here we find the new Mt Hagen resident judge, former Tasmanian crown prosecutor Terry Foulds, now known as Harold Terrence Foulds.
The senior resident judge Kenneth Frank spelled out a bleak scenario for the courts in the year ahead. Before 2013 there were more than 4,000 civil cases pending in the Mt Hagen National and Supreme Courts, and doubtless a lot more have accumulated in the intervening four years.
There is also a backlog of criminal cases stretching back to 1996, which Justice Frank believes need “pro-active action”.
LexisNexis, the ravenous giant squid of legal publishing, has snaffled another independent, high-tech, morsel, Ravel Law.
Ravel was started by a couple of Stanford law school whizz kids and developed through the university’s Centre for Legal Informatics.
The company uses visual maps of cases and analytical tools that can show trends and patterns and how different judges reacted to case law submissions.
The acquisition price has not been revealed but Ravel raised $US14 million in development funding from venture capitalists and others.
It has an arrangement with Harvard Law School to digitise its library of 40,000 books and 40 million pages of court decisions.
The material will initially be made available for free to scholars and non-profits.
Jean O’Grady, the knowledge manager at DLA Piper in the US, criticised the takeover because LexisNexis has a history of not properly integrating other products and services it had purchased. Bloomberg quoted her saying:
“I understand wanting to keep the revenue from all of the legacy products, but there is no evidence of an intent to integrate products into a more powerful LexisNexis platform.”
Last year LexisNexis swallowed another Stanford spin-off Lex Machina, which also specialises in litigation data mining, i.e. legal analytics.
To some extent, Ravel Law is akin to our home-grown Jade service. Fastcase remains one of the few independent legal research services in the US. It says it uses “legal software that democratises the law”.
An undisclosed, but large, bundle of money from deep pockets Melbourne solicitor and property developer Peter McMullin, and his wife Ruth, has found a home at a new Centre in Statelessness at Melbourne law school.
McMullin is a former deputy Lord Mayor of Melbourne, a former Mayor of Geelong, chairman of the McMullin Property Group and of University of Melbourne Alumni.
Ruth is a social worker.
The money came via a contribution to the university’s “Believe” campaign and is sufficient to keep investigations into statelessness ticking for 10 years.
Chancellor Allan Myers described the donation as “one of the most significant and visionary philanthropic initiatives in the history of the law school”. It is the “world’s only” academic centre devoted to the study of statelessness and its problems.
The centre will kick-off next year under the baton of Prof. Michelle Foster, a refugee and human rights guru.
Myers announced that a child is born into statelessness every 10 minutes. We’ve even locked a few of them up in Australia, from time to time.
The chancellor is keen for the new centre to “play a critical role in worldwide efforts to eliminate statelessness …”
Apart from property, the McMullin Group has a diversified portfolio of interests, including funds management, the Epping Medical Centre, Fort Knox Self Storage and Yo-Get-It frozen yoghurt.
Peter is still listed as a special counsel at law shop Cornwall Stodart.
In 2008 he ran on the “Melbourne’s Future” ticket with Tim Wilson from the IPA – with McMullin for Lord Mayor and Freedom Boy as deputy.
The announcement of the donation was one of the attention grabbing moments at the recent gala dinner to celebrate the 160th birthday of the Melb law school.
The Department of Immigration and Border Protection is among the most dreadful of Commonwealth departments with which to deal.
Take the case of NSW far north coast solicitor Nathan Willis, who specialises in migration and refugee work and trades as Visa Assist Australia.
He submitted 12 FOI applications to the department on behalf of clients in Melbourne and Brisbane seeking TPVs. The applications requested documents relating to DIBP’s dealings with these “irregular maritime arrivals” (IMAs).
Contrary to the FOI Act they were returned, with the department saying that these applications were not “requested” and to wait until it was the “turn” of the clients to apply for TPVs.
This has the effect of restricting the time for IMA lawyers to properly prepare applications for protection visas.
It is a policy that is not applied to the FOI requests of non-IMA applicants, so inherently there is an element of “systemic discrimination”. The Act requires a department to notify within 14 days that an application has been received and a decision on the request has to be made within 30 days.
There is no provision that says FIO applications can be returned because they have not been requested.
The bulk rejection of the FOI applications meant that Willis’ firm had to curtail pro bono seminars it for refugees seeking TPVs.
Willis made an application to the DIBP under a scheme known as Compensation for Detriment Caused by Defective Administration (CDDA), seeking $3,600 plus GST for fees relating to 12 hours of “extra, unnecessary work resulting from the department’s defective administration”.
Willis claimed DIBP’s inaction on the FOI requests was “unreasonable, unjust, oppressive or improperly discriminatory”.
After over 12 months of correspondence back and forth between the law firm, the department and the Ombudsman, DIBP rejected the CDDA claim earlier this year.
It appears that between December 1, 2014 and September 20, 2015, Immigration had “registered” over 6,600 FOI requests from IMAs.
Following the arrival of 1,900 visa applications from IMAs in May 2015 a policy decision was made, without consultation, to return FOI requests unless the applicant had been “invited” to apply for a visa.
The Ombudsman investigated the situation and on July 1 last year the DIBP said it had ceased returning FOI requests. The Ombudsman and the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner have requested that in future DIBP comply with the FOI Act.
Along with minister Dutton’s power grab over citizenship decisions, it also discomforting to know that his department had taken it upon itself to switch off and on processing FOI applications whenever it suits.
It’s hardly surprising, since AG Soapy Brandis, who is responsible for the Freedom of Information Act, simply ignores applications that irritate him.
Queensland advocate Michael McDonald is by now the full bottle on defamation law after his leave to appeal was dismissed.
Last year the Supreme Court jury in Melbourne found that McDonald had defamed a local copper, Colin Dods, who was awarded $150,000 in damages.
Dodds was one of the officers present when 15-year old Tyler Cassidy had been shot dead. Tyler is believed to have been the youngest person killed by police in Australia. At the time he was shot he was in an agitated state and wielding a knife. A coronial inquiry inquiry in 2011 found:
“When the three police members fired at Tyler, it was at a time that LSC Dods was in immediate and perilous danger of serious injury or death.”
McDonald was a barrister in 2012 when he posted two items of his website about the shooting. They conveyed imputations that Dods “executed” Cassidy; that he shot and killed the lad without any or adequate reason; he used excessive force; that he could have overpowered Cassidy instead of shooting him six times; and that he committed manslaughter.
On the cusp of the trial before Kevin Bell, McDonald dropped all his defences save for triviality. He did not give evidence.
Warren CJ, along with Whelan JA and Cameron AJA dismissed the defendant’s application for leave to appeal against the damages. McDonald claimed the online publication was limited in time and scope and that Bell J was speculating when he found the website justice4tylercassidyjust15.com was at the top of the Google rankings.
Further, he contended that it wasn’t necessarily true that people would have read the two pages behind the home page.
VicAppeals threw it out, saying:
“The defamatory claims made in the publications in this case were at the highest end of the scale.
The allegation of committing manslaughter, a grave crime in society, could have created severe and long-lasting damage to reputation.”