It is certainly fair that someone like Amber Heard should be believed about allegations of violence in the hope that those in similar positions feel empowered to do the same. But Heard is a wealthy, well-connected woman; how similar are these positions likely to be? It is well and good on one level to support survivors of violence by bringing their experience into the mainstream using celebrity culture, but there is a need to go beyond this.

Last month I received a legal letter accusing me of defamation. Someone who was very close to me for many years – but now is not – had read a piece of short fiction I had published and decided a minor character was about them. Like every writer ever born, I have gleaned sentences, character traits and events, and I’ve hodgepodged it all together to try and convey an emotional truth. It’s what we do, right? Never once had I considered defamation.

The Unforgiving Rope: Murder and Hanging on Australia’s Western Frontier Simon Adams UWAP Have you got one of those relatives, the kind who insists that the answer to all the world’s problems is to bring back hanging? You know who I mean. They usually live in a fantasy land called the Good Old Days. Yes? […]

From Moree to Mabo: The Mary Gaudron Story Pamela Burton UWAP From Moree to Mabo is the compelling and readable biography of a remarkable lawyer. Although some of the detailed analysis of the key cases and political turmoils of Mary Gaudron’s time as Solicitor General of NSW can be overwhelming, it is hard to put […]

Last year a friend invited me to what I thought was going to be a lecture by the outspoken feminist Professor Sheila Jeffreys titled: ‘Prostitution in St. Kilda, How The Law Has Failed Sex Workers.’

Talk of banning the burqa is twisting some civil rights knickers again. This time in South Australia. What I find interesting is that people (on all sides of this debate) seem to think legislating against something that makes large groups of society uncomfortable is outrageously novel. But it happens all the time. By law, I […]

Those are the facts. Justice Martin then had the task of interpreting them. He concluded that this ‘crime is toward the lower end of the scale of seriousness for crimes of manslaughter’.

The Lede blog in the New York Times today has a post by Robert Mackey, ‘Drone Strikes Are Legal, U.S. Official Says’. Highly recommend reading. I’ve embedded a video from the post in which Harold Hongju Koh, the US State Department’s top lawyer, defends the ‘legitimacy’ of drone attacks and targeted assassinations. As Mackey points […]

Next month, an organisation called The Lawfare Project (TLP) is putting on a conference about lawfare, which it defines as: the abuse of the law and legal systems for strategic ends. The role of the organisation is set out on their website. The scope of the Lawfare Project’s focus is limited to lawfare as it […]

I spend 22 hours a week in one of the busiest needle exchanges in the world. Apart from the obvious statistical data informing me of this, there are two reasons why I know it to be true. Firstly, the existence of a loophole in the laws in Australia allowing us to distribute needles to the […]