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The latest issue of the Australian Law Journal (Volume 97 Part 8) contains the following material:
CURRENT ISSUES – Editor: Justice François Kunc
Guest Editor: Dr Ruth CA Higgins SC
- Historic Joint Sitting of Heads of Western Australian Courts
- More on Judicial Bullying: Judicial Commission of Victoria
- The Coronation Service of King Charles III and Queen Camilla: A Thousand Years in the Making – Daniel Yazdani
CONVEYANCING AND PROPERTY – Editors: Robert Angyal SC and Brendan Edgeworth
- Resulting Trusts after Bosanac v Federal Commissioner of Taxation
PERSONALIA – Editor: Emily Vale
- Commonwealth
- Justice Geoffrey Kennett
- Justice Catherine Button
- Australian Capital Territory
- Western Australia
- Justice Amanda Forrester
- Justice Samuel Vandongen
- Justice Michael Lundberg
RECENT CASES – Editor: Ruth CA Higgins
- Public International Law – Foreign State Immunity – Immunity from Jurisdiction – Proceedings for Recognition and Enforcement of Arbitral Award
Articles
Investigators, Cognitive Bias and Double-Dipping: Misunderstanding Opinion Evidence in Trials and Appeals – Gary Edmond
This article examines the misuse of evidence in trials and appeals. Specifically, the systematic mis-representation and over-valuing of opinion evidence. It explains how inattention to the independence (and value) of different strands of (circumstantial) evidence, along with dangers posed by context effects and cognitive biases, results in contamination, such that the same evidence might be unwittingly “dipped into”, and so counted, more than once. These problems are sometimes compounded when jurors are enabled to undertake comparisons (eg of voice recordings or persons in images) in the extremely suggestive conditions of the accusatorial trial. Such practices not only dilute criminal proof, they encourage unfairness and irrationality. Traditional trial safeguards (and personnel) have failed to recognise, let alone address, these problems and the substantial risks entailed.
Following a five-year inquiry, the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse produced its final report in 2017. Its recommended legislative reforms permitting survivors of historical child sexual abuse to obtain civil law redress brought a sense of optimism that their claims would be finally determined on their merits at court. While an increase of these previously barred claims was explicitly expected, it is unclear whether this included the corresponding rise in applications seeking a permanent stay? Either way, the development of authority, which has the practical consequence of preventing plaintiffs from maintaining such claims where the putative abuser cannot be confronted with the allegations due to death or infirmity, presents a direct challenge to the efficacy of the Royal Commission’s objectives and recommendations. In doing so, it has produced similar outcomes to the so-called “Dead Man Statutes”, the derided statutory vestiges of the common law’s long-abolished qualification against interest rules.
BOOK REVIEW – Editor: Angelina Gomez
- 50 Human Rights Cases That Changed Australia, by Lucy Geddes and Hamish McLachlan
For the PDF version of the table of contents, click here: New Westlaw Australia – ALJ Vol 97 No 8 Contents.
Click here to access this Part on New Westlaw AU
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