Sir Victor examines the basic problems being encountered in the development of the international law of the seabed. An historical analysis reveals that the definitions used to effect the current allocation of rights in the seabed are not based on irresistible logical extensions of the concept of territorial sovereignty. On the contrary, legal definitions such as the definition of “continental shelf” represent and facilitate the political reality of competitive nationalism. Sir Victor then considers the constitutional relationship of the States and the Commonwealth in regard to the seabed. He argues that, historically, the States have no claim to sovereignty over their adjacent territorial seas as the colonies never exercised dominium there. The territorial seas remained in British Imperial jurisdiction until federation, when the Commonwealth acquired sovereignty over them as an attribute of nationhood.

The extent to which the motives of providers and recipients (of care) diverge can be seen in the nursing home market – nominally under regulation, but at the worst deteriorating into a real estate market with revenue generating aged persons attached to the property like serfs to the manor.

The profit making people in the nursing homes know full well how to be quite ruthless and brutal in trying to mobilize emotional responses in the community against a government so that they can exploit the taxpayer by forcing a government into paying out more money … when it suited the private commercial nursing home people, patients were moved on litters out of their nursing homes to the edge of the footpaths of the street outside the homes. It was arranged for the media, particularly the visual media, to cover the whole exercise. All sorts of emotional displays were indulged in.

The Trade Marks Act 1955 (Cth) (referred to in this article as “the Act”) provides in ss 24-26 various criteria for establishing the registrability of trade marks under the Act Those provisions require a trade mark to be distinctive or if not distinctive, capable of becoming distinctive of goods or services in respect of which registration of the trade mark is sought, before it could be registered.

This article examines s 25 of the Act, which provides for the registration of trade marks in Part B of the Trade Marks Register, in the light of some of the decisions of Australian courts. The object is to determine if such decisions conform with the terms of the provision. Some comparisons are made with the relevant provisions of the Trade Marks Act 1938 (UK). The article concludes that given the terms of s 25 of the Act, acquired distinctiveness could be a sole criterion for the registration of trade marks in Part B of the Register. The frrst part of the article considers the background to the section.

This article considers the impact of the doctrine of legal personality as enunciated in the classic corporate law case, Salomon v Salomon & Co Ltd, on our theories concerning the role of the membership within a corporation, in particular the role of the membership within a university corporation.

Universities live on the edge of corporate law. Although it has been one hundred years since the judgment in Salomon's case, the ground rules of university governance were established well before that judgment. Furthermore, Salomon's case involved a one-man company organised under the Companies Act 1862 (UK) and universities are not typically organised under business incorporation statutes. Nevertheless, Salomon's case has had a dramatic effect on the way we view the constitutional structure of all corporations, including university corporations.

The effect of a recent decision of the High Court of Australia in Foley v Padley is to severely curtail the extent of judicial review of the exercise of discretionary prohibitions. In the light of this decision, the Question of the nature of a prohibition contained in subordinate legislation when coupled with a dispensing power becomes of more than academic interest. In Foley v Padley, the effect of an empowering provision referable to the opinion of the subordinate legislator (a municipal council) was considered in relation to a broad unfettered discretion to dispense with a prohibition. Thus this decision brought directly into issue the role of the administrator/ policy-maker as against the rights of an individual.

In brief, Foley v Padley decided that a dispensing power attached to a power to prohibit in a by-law was a valid condition of the power to prohibit, thus following the decision in Country Roads Board v Neale Ads. As the decision of the High Court in Swan Hill Corporation v Bradbury was the last occasion on which this issue had been fully considered by the High Court one can only lament the passing of an opportunity to re-open the debate as to dispensing powers.

The concept of equality has been a familiar tenet of democratic theory since antiquity, but it has always been a skewed notion. In Athens, the birthplace of democracy (demokratia: the power of the people), women and slaves were excluded from ‘the people’ so far as life in the polis was concerned. Aristotle believed that this exclusion was justified because women and slaves were inferior in phusei (by their natures). The idea that ‘justifiable’ discrimination may be invoked selectively to derogate from equality continues to be the case today. What is justifiable is determined by those with power, just as it always has been. Equality between human beings, therefore, is a contingent and permeable notion; absolute equality belongs only in the world of the quantifiable and the mathematical. While women and Others have been ‘let in’ to public life, the heritage of the past continues to lie like a dead weight on equal participation.

This article examines five Sasanian bullae from the fire temple of Ādur Gušnasp with seal impressions depicting Aphrodite and Eros, and Aphrodite Anadyomene. It is argued that the original seal with Aphrodite and Eros likely dates from the late 1st century BCE to the early 1st century CE, reused between the 5th–7th centuries CE, while the Aphrodite Anadyomene seal is from the 2nd or 3rd century CE. Contextualizing these findings within Graeco-Roman and Iranian cultures, this article explores reinterpretations of Graeco-Roman iconography for both Zoroastrian and non-Zoroastrian audiences, as well as highlights that bullae with concave impressions of cylindrically curved objects on the reverse had once been attached to vessels, not just documents. Additionally, this article also discusses other sealings on the new bullae, some with Middle Persian inscriptions, identifying a mgw (priest) and an astrologer, providing the first attestation of the word axtar (constellation) on a Sasanian seal.

Australians, it is said, live in a representative democracy. As citizens of that democracy they are ultimately able to hold their political representatives to account via the electoral process. In the interim between electoral episodes they form the views upon which that holding to account will be based. At the same time, they participate in and evaluate governmental processes in a variety of ways, some of them statutory, some of them via the Parliament of the day, and many of them via the media, lobby organisations, interest groups and other proxies.

Informational transparency is central to this holding to account. This was famously recognised by the High Court in the so called ‘freedom of political communication’ cases in 1992. Those cases constituted the first explicit judicial recognition that ‘the sovereign power which resides in the people [and] is exercised on their behalf by their representatives’ was more than simply a political doctrine, but was in fact a constitutional fundamental capable of limiting, as it did in those cases, Commonwealth legislative power.

The introduction of Division 2A into Part V of the Trade Practices Act has brought Australia firmly into line with current thinking in the Western world on the liability of manufacturers. The new Division has two aspects. First, it provides consumers, and in some cases their successors in title, with a statutory right to compensation from manufacturers and importers in specified circumstances. Secondly, it grants to sellers of goods a right to indemnity from a manufacturer (or importer) where the latter is liable to compensate the consumer under this Division.

This article examines the likely effect that the introduction of Division 2A will have on the liability of manufacturers and importers of goods. The article commences by outlining the liability of manufacturers in Australia prior to the recent amendments. The operation and scope of Division 2A are then described. The article concludes by focusing on certain practical difficulties and problems of interpretation inherent in the new Division.

Constitutional law — Australian Security Intelligence Organization — Executive power in relation to collection of information in the interests of security — Constitutional law — Constitution s. 116 — No religious test shall be required as a qualification for any office or public trust under the Commonwealth

P G Sharp's paper entitled ‘The First Paragraph of Section 55' was a valuable and interesting contribution to analysis of one of the more interesting, yet little discussed, sections of the Constitution. He provided a rich historical background to the section and its interpretation, and essentially made the argument that, following Permanent Trustee Australia Ltd v Commissioner of State Revenue (Victoria), there is no further need for legislative drafters to split taxation legislation into a ‘Taxing Act’ and an ‘Assessment Act’.

However, Sharp's argument leaves a great deal unsaid, and I have constructed four questions to set against his article, inviting further comment.

Considerable confusion and difference of opinion exists as to the precise boundaries of jurisdiction in custody matters between Federal and State courts. This Article examines the main cases in which the scope of the Family Court's custody jurisdiction has been in issue, and reviews suggestions made to remedy the problems resulting from the division of jurisdiction. The authors argue for an interpretation of the relevant provisions of the Family Law Act 1975 (Cth) which is consistent with the trend of High Court authority as to the scope of the marriage power (section 51(xxi) of the Constitution), and which would remove much of the uncertainty concerning the Family Court's jurisdiction.

In Plaintiff M61/2010E v Commonwealth (‘Plaintiff M61’), the High Court held in a unanimous joint judgment that the plaintiff asylum seekers on Christmas Island were entitled to procedural fairness and to have their claims for refugee status determined according to law. This decision has significant ramifications for the government’s asylum seeker policy, and it has already been the subject of academic commentary from an immigration perspective. The case also has broader doctrinal significance because it is only the second time that the full bench has considered what this article will call a ‘no-consideration’ clause. The Court held that the legislature can validly confer a power on a decision-maker and at the same time provide that the decision-maker has no duty to consider exercising it. However, on the facts before it, the Minister had decided to consider all requests for asylum and thus had moved beyond the protection of the no-consideration clause.

There is no doubt that the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission ('ACCC’) has provoked very strong opinions among big business in Australia. This criticism reached its height in 2002 and 2003, at the end of Professor Allan Fels’ period as Chairman of the Commission. At this time, the Chief Executive Officers of a number of Australia's biggest companies regularly and publicly criticised the ACCC, and Professor Fels himself, for being ‘unfair, unjust and immoral', and having no ‘line of accountability at all.’ The ACCC's behaviour was criticised for being ‘a corruption of administration of the Trade Practices Act', ‘false and misleading behaviour on the part of the cop', and for using publicity ‘in a way that damages companies before they are proven guilty'. One chief executive said that ‘Fels’ use of the media … smacks of the Gestapo.’ Another called Fels a ‘smiling assassin’ who had inflicted ‘irreparable harm to the Australian economy.’