The Power of Apology: Mercy, Forgiveness or Corrective Justice in the Civil Liability Arena (2007) Vol 1 Art 5

The recent rash of apology-protecting legislation in tort law in the common law world raises interesting questions about why apologies are so important. The function of apologies within society generally is not absolutely clear. It is even less clear what their function in relation to civil liability is and how the relationship between the law and apologies works. It is fairly clear that legislators desire apologies to reduce litigation on the basis of some naïve view that that is what people really want and that the common legal advice to never apologise is actually very bad for society in general. In this paper I argue first that defining apologies is crucial to determining their function, that apologies have multiple functions and that one of them is corrective justice. Another is to mediate relationships and to achieve reconciliation or healing through a process of apology, forgiveness and redemption. When should an apology be protected and why can only be answered if we have a real understanding of both the psychological and sociological effects of apologies. In particular we need to understand the interactions of different types of norms, including norms of civility, legal norms, professional ethics and so on. The article attempts to go some way towards this understanding

Australia’s (Slow) Experiment with Indigenous Customary Law in Intestacy

Australia’s treatment of its Indigenous people in terms of dispossession of land is well known. What is thought of less is Australia’s lack of attention to the civil law needs of its Indigenous people. In the last twenty years there has finally been some attention paid to the issues Indigenous people face in respect of the common law of succession and how it affects them. The Northern Territory brought in an Indigenous customary law provision in 1979 but it has been little used. In 2009 NSW amended its intestacy legislation to allow Indigenous customary law to be used where the deceased died intestate. For nearly 11 years there were no cases using the legislation, but now there have been several. How these cases have dealt with the concept of customary law, and how the interaction of the customary law with the statutory and common law of inheritance in Australia has affected this jurisdiction is explored in this paper. Instead of treating Indigenous law using conflicts of laws methods, other methods have been used, sometimes for sound reasons, but running the risk of not accepting customary law as ‘real’ law. The paper asks how the questions of authority are to be dealt with in situations where the common law doesn’t really see the authority which customary law adherents see. Complex issues concerning access to justice may affect the ‘coherence’ of the concept of customary law in this situatio

Construction Claims

Philip Davenport and Helen Durham, 2013, Federation Press, 3rd ed, ppi-xiv, 1-338, index, case table, legislation table, glossary of terms, ISBN978-1-86287-912-6, Price AUD85.0

Predicting Bearing Fault in the Drone Freight Industry: Legal Liability in Australia

Many people are now aware of drones or remotely piloted aircraft (RPAs), and several others have predicted the significant impacts that drones will bring across society. Today, there is an expectation that drones will play a pivotal role in industries such as surveillance, security, surveying, construction, and freight transport. However, in all these cases, whenever a drone is flying over a populated area, it poses a danger to people or things on the ground. Perhaps the sector where the greatest risk of injury to the everyday person exists is the drone delivery industry. The drone freight industry is proliferating fast, with many companies like Skycart and Amazon investing in this sector. These companies plan to transport groceries, medical supplies, food, and par- cels, among many other things. If fleets of delivery drones are deployed around suburbs, the descent to lower altitudes and the general logistics of an airborne delivery presents a novel risk of harm. A drone failure resulting in a crash could lead to property damage, destruction of natural environments, and injury or death to persons, especially in areas of high population density. One promising way to prevent such harm is to use structural condition monitoring technology to preempt any deterioration of the airworthiness of a drone. In the absence of any existing precedent or authority on this, this Article investigates the legal implications of using such technology to guide future regulations and areas of research

A Fragile Bastion: UNSW Judicial Stress Trauma Study

Report on a study of NSW judicial officers at all levels on the stressors they face including physical and verbal threats, media vilification, isolation, level of workplace support and indeed level and location of court. The study found significant levels of trauma and seeks to ascertain specific causes for these

Predicting Bearing Fault in the Drone Freight Industry: Legal Liability in Australia

Many people are now aware of drones or remotely piloted aircraft (RPAs), and several others have predicted the significant impacts that drones will bring across society. Today, there is an expectation that drones will play a pivotal role in industries such as surveillance, security, surveying, construction, and freight transport. However, in all these cases, whenever a drone is flying over a populated area, it poses a danger to people or things on the ground. Perhaps the sector where the greatest risk of injury to the everyday person exists is the drone delivery industry. The drone freight industry is proliferating fast, with many companies like Skycart and Amazon investing in this sector. These companies plan to transport groceries, medical supplies, food, and par- cels, among many other things. If fleets of delivery drones are deployed around suburbs, the descent to lower altitudes and the general logistics of an airborne delivery presents a novel risk of harm. A drone failure resulting in a crash could lead to property damage, destruction of natural environments, and injury or death to persons, especially in areas of high population density. One promising way to prevent such harm is to use structural condition monitoring technology to preempt any deterioration of the airworthiness of a drone. In the absence of any existing precedent or authority on this, this Article investigates the legal implications of using such technology to guide future regulations and areas of research

An overview of some unexpected consequences of compensation law

Prue Vines Arno Akkermans Prue Vines is Professor and Co-Director, Private Law Research and Policy Group at the Faculty of Law, UNSW Sydney. Arno Akkermans is Professor of law at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and director of the Amsterdam Law and Behaviour Institute (A-LAB) . Compensation law concerns the legal recognition of wrongs which cause harm and the giving of compensatory awards in recognition of the wrong and the harm. The area of personal injury is particularly significant and is often thought of as the primary area of compensation law, with a focus on negligence, workers’ compensation and other schemes; but other areas of private law are also significant where personal injury and/or economic loss may arise. Thus compensation law may encompass a range of causes of action and a large range of systems, all of which are aimed at compensating persons for their harms. Unfortunately, it has become clear that..