Women Barristers Paid Less than Men
The majority newly admitted lawyers in NSW are women, making up 63% of all law graduates. But only 20% of barristers are female, and they get paid a lot less than their male peers. Last week, the NSW Bar Association...
People Shot Dead by Police in US, UK and Australia
A disturbing infographic depicts the number of people killed in the United States as a result of police shootings – a staggering 776 people have been shot dead by US police so far this year. By contrast, the total in...
Paedphiles Identified through Personal Features
Criminologists have been searching for the magic formula for identifying criminals for hundreds of years, without much luck. Scientists have tried all sorts of things - from cruel experiments on live humans during medieval times and in Nazi Germany, to...
Dog Attacks: The Liability of Owners
An eight-year-old girl has lost her hand after being bitten by a dog on the weekend. According to news reports, the girl was playing with other children at around 3pm on Saturday afternoon under the supervision of an adult, when...
Females Sentenced to be Gang Raped
While there are certainly problems with the Australian criminal justice system, we are lucky enough to live in a society where punishments are not designed to inflict cruelty, degradation and humiliation. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for some countries,...
Chemical Castration of Child Sex Offenders: Is it Effective?
There has been a national crackdown on child sex offending in recent months, with NSW Premier Mike Baird announcing tougher maximum penalties and ‘standard non-parole periods’ earlier this year. But NSW Justice Minister Troy Grant wants to go one step...
The Australian Border Force: What Powers Do They Have?
If you watched the news towards the end of last week, chances are you heard about the Australian Border Force (ABF) debacle which sparked a massive protest in Melbourne’s CBD on Friday afternoon. The outrage was triggered by a poorly-worded...
Bail Laws to Get Tougher for Suspected Terrorists
Regular readers of our blog will know that the NSW government has been changing the law on bail more frequently than most of us can keep up with. And now, the Baird government has announced that more changes are on...
Can All Lawyers Give Migration Law Advice?
As we discussed in one of our recent blogs, questions about visas often arise when advising on criminal law cases. In recent years, a number of changes to the law have confused the question of who is permitted to give...
Watch What You Say! Defamation and Social Media
Anyone using social media can be a publisher for the purposes of Australian defamation laws, and any publisher can be liable for defamation. This can even include re-publishing or otherwise promoting the defamatory statements of others. The tweet that caused...