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The C word(s)
May years ago, one of our boys came home from primary school with an important announcement: someone in their class had used “the C word”. We were somewhat taken aback by this. There was no conversation that could come out of it which we were anywhere near ready to have. So it was with a… Continue reading
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It’s all fun and games until somebody loses an “i”
A couple of times each year a judgment comes across my desk in which what was intended to be a reference to “the Minister” turns out, on closer inspection, to be a reference to “the Minster”. The judge didn’t pick it up. Whoever typed the judgment (if it wasn’t the judge) didn’t pick it up.… Continue reading
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Another side title bites the dust
From a citation point of view, I am inclined to treat the case names that appear as side titles in law reports as gospel. (I am talking about the titles that run down the side of the page, not the ones that run across the top of the page; those have their own problems.) So… Continue reading
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Learning journey
According to Oscar Wilde, there is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about. Oscar Wilde’s metrics are different from mine. Imagine that you were a senior officer at an important public institution, and that a significant part of your job involved making sure that… Continue reading
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Side titles: one that got away
In the book I say some possibly heretical things about what name you should give to a case that your judge is citing. But I also say that, generally speaking, when you see a side title (ie, a case name that runs down the outside margin of the pages in a law report) you can… Continue reading
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Apropos of absolutely nothing
Whenever I see a word in a judgment which I think I know the meaning of, but which is not all that common a word, I look it up in the online Oxford English Dictionary, just to be sure. This is not a bad habit to get into, because you never know when what you… Continue reading
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The common form criminal appeal provision, aka my brain hurts
The High Court is regularly asked to hear cases that engage, to some degree, with what is known as the common form criminal appeal provision, and/or the “proviso” to that provision. This probably comes as no great surprise to those who are active in the field. The provision itself has a lot of moving parts,… Continue reading
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Privy Council appeals from the High Court of Australia: not just a nostalgic reverie
There was a time, long ago, when lawyers could occasionally convince their clients to fly them to London in order to have an appeal in their case heard by the members of the Privy Council. (Did they fly first class? It would be tawdry to speculate.) Those were indeed the days. Like all good things,… Continue reading
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Case number or opening page number?
If you have looked at an English law report in recent years, and in particular one of the many reports published by Sweet & Maxwell, you may have noticed that some of them have taken to giving each reported case its own case number. The Criminal Appeal Reports is a good example; it is a… Continue reading
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What is this sh*t?
I recently had occasion to consider the difference between “sewerage” and “sewage”. I had never consciously turned my mind to this before. I had been inclined to think that, like “flammable” and “inflammable”, they were two ways of referring to the same thing. Or that they were variant spellings; maybe, for example, one was American… Continue reading
What is the 'it'? 