What is the 'it'?

The blog of the book

  • A reader writes …

    “I have encountered your nemesis!” The reader attached the following photograph: This is, indeed, the street sign I refer to in the book as a particularly disturbing example of ambiguity. Look, to be honest it’s not even ambiguous. It’s actually meaningless. What are these “other times”? When does the 15-minute restriction not apply? Is there… Continue reading

  • We were wrong …

    … Or were we? In what was, for me, a new – and, one hopes, not often to be repeated – experience, I was recently called out, in public, as having made a mistake in my book. I had been invited “upstairs” for what turned out to be an occasion to mark the dubious achievement… Continue reading

  • Second reading speeches: their part in my downfall

    Second reading speeches are the things where the relevant Minister stands up in Parliament and extols the virtues of some proposed piece of legislation before putting it to the House for a vote. Courts can refer to these to ascertain the intention of Parliament when faced with legislation that is – perish the thought –… Continue reading

  • Chapter titles: the mystery revealed

    A lot of people have asked me* for an explanation of the chapter titles in the book. It is time to reveal all. 1. “Hi, How Are You?” is the name of an album by American “outsider” musician Daniel Johnston. I may have inferred the question mark. 2. “Manifesto” is a Roxy Music album. 3.… Continue reading

  • 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

  • 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

  • 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

  • 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

  • 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

  • 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