For the last 40 or more years, academic administrative lawyers have advocated an ever-more expansionary role for judicial review of administrative action, and their urgings have usually been well-attuned to similarly expansionist tendencies on the part of the judges. Expansionists grew accustomed to being on the winning side, both in Australia and England, but we in Australia are beginning to learn that nothing lasts forever, even while the English expansions continue at almost break-neck speed. Three High Court cases are especially noteworthy. They are Re Minister for Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs; Ex parte Lam ('Lam’); NEAT Domestic Trading Pty Ltd v AWB Ltd ('NEAT Domestic’); and Griffith University v Tang ('Tang’).

The power of the Commonwealth Parliament to authorise involuntary detention (that is, detention without the consent of the detainee) by the executive government has fallen for consideration by the High Court in a series of recent cases. The Court has also examined the circumstances in which courts may make orders for detention. The aim of this article is to discuss some of the issues which have arisen in these cases, including those over which there has been apparent disagreement between the Justices of the High Court. It argues for a conceptually coherent approach to detention, which favours substance over form while giving effect to the strict separation of judicial power from legislative and executive power required by the Commonwealth Constitution.

In order to advance the ‘unity of the system’ of international law, it is necessary to resolve conflicts of norms and to endeavour to ensure that where tension exists, reconciliation is achieved. The commitment of states to engage in international criminal cooperation has the potential to conflict with many different human rights obligations, such as the prohibition against torture. The recent controversy relating to European states aiding the United States to affect extraordinary renditions is an example of the way in which a state's commitment to international criminal cooperation and a state's commitment to fundamental human rights may potentially conflict.

Pursuant to s 5(1) of the Disability Discrimination Act 1992 (Cth) (“the Act“), an alleged discriminator will have discriminated against a person with a disability if they treat the disabled person less favourably, because of their disability, than they treat or would have treated someone without the disability, ‘in circumstances that are the same or are not materially different'.

A matter crucial to the assessment of whether there has been illegal discrimination for the purposes of the Act, therefore, is what constitutes the circumstances of the aggrieved person's case. In order for there to be a contravention of the Act not only must the alleged discriminator have treated the disabled person less favourably than they would have treated someone without a disability, but the alleged discriminator must have treated the disabled person less favourably than they would have treated someone without a disability who was in the same circumstances as the person with the disability.

In Forge v Australian Securities and Investments Commission the High Court considered whether the appointment of acting judges to a state Supreme Court was constitutionally permissible. By a majority of six to one, the Court found that such appointments were constitutionally valid. The decision is an important illustration of the way that the ‘Kable principle', which works to maintain the institutional integrity of Australia's integrated system of courts, continues to evolve in Australian constitutional law. This casenote examines how the judgments in Forge v ASIC extend the Kable principle to cover the composition and structure of state courts, and seek to link the Kable principle with the text of the Constitution.

In commencing his sprawling collective portrait of 19th century Britain a few years ago, A N Wilson stated simply, ‘[t]he Victorians are still with us.’ The truth of this, he went on to explain, lay in the fact that, though much changed, the world which they created persists. Although we seem to be at a great remove from the concerns, innovations and ideals of that era, Wilson ably demonstrated that the world left to us by the Victorians was immutably different from that which existed beforehand. As such it marked a break with the past and set in place the parameters within which the modern age has continued to develop.