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Your judge wants to cite a footnote in a High Court judgment. How hard could that be?
Your judge has found a footnote in a High Court judgment which they would like to cite. Like most High Court judgments, this one has been reported in the Commonwealth Law Reports. The judge cites the CLR version of the case and the footnote number as it appears there. And that’s the end of the Continue reading
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Temporary ambiguities are still ambiguities: the invisible “that”
I guess I just like things to be clear. Is that too much to ask? An ambiguity is “temporary” if the intended meaning can be worked out with a little effort. These are not as painful to me as genuinely insoluble ambiguities. But they still hurt. One example of a temporary ambiguity, to borrow the Continue reading
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The semicolon. What’s with that?
At one time I had a section of the book devoted to the semicolon. One of the many regrets in my life is that I took it out of the finished product, on the basis that I felt that the book was starting to look like a general grammar text – territory I am wholly Continue reading
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From the Department of Blowing My Own Trumpet
So, yes, I wrote a book. But is it any good? I couldn’t possibly say. But you might take a look at page two of the 22 December 2023 issue of the Queensland Law Reporter for an independent assessment. Continue reading
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The dangling participle: how egregious is egregious?
At one point in the book, I state the view – not so startling when read in context, I hope – that you can probably let your judge dangle all but the most egregious of dangling participles. But what kind of dangling participle would be egregious enough to warrant an associate’s attention? I think I Continue reading
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The missing acknowledgements page
One of the many things I learnt from writing this book is that, once you submit the final manuscript to your publisher, things move very quickly. In this way, a six-year marathon suddenly became a short and very fast sprint. It is for this reason, and only this reason, that the book doesn’t have an Continue reading
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Sometimes it’s “nor” but quite a lot of the time it’s just “or”
Not unlike with the use of “whom” (when sometimes they should just have used “who”) – a topic that I write about in the book – the judicial tendency towards longer, and/or more fancier-sounding, words can lead a judge on occasion to write “nor” when what they really should have written was “or”. Sometimes I Continue reading
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Launch!
On Wednesday, 18 October 2023 we had a launch for the book. Thanks to Katerina and Mai at the ANU branch of Harry Hartog for helping to make the evening a success. And big thanks to K M Hayne AC, former Justice of the High Court and present exemplary human being, for agreeing to do Continue reading
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Plurality Revisited
The day after I submitted the final draft of my manuscript to Federation Press, an associate rang me. “The judge wants to know if you have a view on what ‘plurality’ means.” “Hold my beer”, I replied. I do have a view. Four pages of my book, in fact, are devoted to an attempt to Continue reading
What is the 'it'? 