Melbourne Law School - Research Publications
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ItemGovernment control of royal assent in Victoria( 2006)The giving of royal assent to proposed laws was the centre of a controversy in Victoria in 2005. These events directed fresh attention to the power of the Queen's representative, the Governor, and of the Victorian Government, over Bills that have passed both Houses of Parliament but not yet become law. This article comments on the legal basis of royal assent and the question of whether the government can advise the Governor to withhold assent to a Bill that has passed both Houses.
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ItemHad we but worlds enough, and time, this absolute, philosopher( 2006)In Logiques des mondes, Alain Badiou has produced a sequel to his magnum opus Being and Event. Whereas Being and Event primarily restricted itself to the relationship between ontology and the event, mathematics and poetry, the new book seriously extends and revises certain of its predecessor’s propositions in order to construct a logic of different ‘worlds’. This article outlines some of the major doctrines, arguments, and motivations for the new work, as well as several points of possible difficulty.
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ItemOHMS: some reflections on the business of our courts(The Victorian Bar, 2006)The author expresses regret at the importation of business management principles into the provision of a service to the public.
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ItemEffects of tort law reform on medical liability(Thomson, 2005)In the period 2001-2004, legislation has been passed in all Australian jurisdictions to effect “tort law reform”. This article outlines some of these changes, focusing particularly on the amendments to the Wrongs Act 1958 (Vic), though it also draws attention to corresponding changes in other jurisdictions. The new legislation creates new immunities from liability; limits recovery for psychiatric injury; reintroduces in modified form the Bolam test of professional negligence; replaces the “not far-fetched or fanciful” test of foreseeability with one requiring that the risk be “not insignificant”; extends the scope of the traditional defence of voluntary assumption of risk; and provides caps, thresholds and a higher discount rate in relation to damages. The impact that these changes may have on the liability of health professionals is considered.
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ItemThe practice and 'pathologies' of photocopying(School of Culture and Communication, The University of Melbourne, 2007-04)Outside of contemporary art practice, the act of photocopying is by-and-large not given much consideration by general users and is only granted limited treatment within discussions of electronic media. This paper seeks to redress this, by speculating on the practice of photocopying and some of the less remarked on behaviours and ‘drives’ which motivate and structure this practice. It begins by sketching briefly the development of commercial photocopying technologies and some of their artistic uses. Then, drawing on various written accounts and observational research in a large public research library, it explores a number of ‘pathologies’ or curiosities of behaviour and motivation which attend and characterise the act of photocopying. The paper concludes by suggesting that gaining insight into these patterns and processes can contribute to a richer understanding of the practice of everyday photocopying, as well as human-machine interaction more generally.
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ItemJustinian and mathematics: an analysis of the Digest’s compilation plan(Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2005)The compilation of the Digest comprised the major component of the acclaimed Second Law Commission of Justinian the Great. The commission was formed on 15 December 530 and concluded three years later on 16 December 533. Its task was to edit and condense almost 1000 years of Roman legal writing; this it achieved in a single volume of fifty books. The question that has intrigued modern legal historians is how was the final compilation realised. The first major advance in answering this question occurred in 1820, when Bluhme proposed that the original books of legal writings (libri) had been excerpted in an orderly manner to produce four masses (bodies of text), which were subsequently combined during an editing stage to form the Digest. Bluhme also argued that these four masses had been assigned to three committees, which he named the Sabinian, the Edictal and the Papinian; the smaller fourth mass, the Appendix, having later been appended to the Papinian mass. Subsequently, Krueger made some minor amendments to Bluhme’s list. This revised list, which shows the order in which the committees excerpted their material, is called the Bluhme-Krueger Ordo. The next major insight into the Digest’s compilation came in the 1970s when Honoré proposed that each of the three committees was divided into two subcommittees for the purpose of excerpting. I utilise Honoré’s quantitative analysis of the Digest to provide a detailed statistical and arithmetical argument that the commissioners were operating under a pre-ordained plan in which the existing body of legal writing was to be reduced to precisely 5% of the total number of libri lines available to the commission. Moreover, I show how by understanding this key to the Digest’s compilation one can reveal various other details of the commission’s work, including an identification of the excerpting and editing contributions of specific commissioners, as well as the commission’s general timetable.