This article examines the conduct of empirical legal research and its relationship to law reform. Through a detailed analysis of the largest survey of State and federal judges conducted in Australia it explores some of the limits to empirical investigation, particularly the tendency to rely primarily on judicial perspectives as the basis for law reform. Focusing upon empirical legal research on the subject of expert evidence the article initially examines research methodologies, then extends the analysis to consider the correspondence between the collection, interpretation and presentation of empirical data and recommendations for legal change. This involves an assessment of a broad range of methodological and theoretical issues with implications extending well beyond the particular survey. Last, the empirical research on expert evidence will be evaluated using the principal reform proposal suggested by the investigators. This exercise will provide an indication of methodological problems which beset the survey and demonstrate practical limitations with the particular approach to expertise.

We study the last exit time that a spectrally negative Lévy process is below zero until it reaches a positive level b, denoted by $g_{\tau_b^+}$. We generalize the results of the infinite-horizon last exit time explored by Chiu and Yin (2005) by incorporating a random horizon $\tau_b^+$, which represents the first passage time above b. We derive an explicit expression for the joint Laplace transform of $g_{\tau_b^+}$ and $\tau_b^+$ by utilizing a hybrid observation scheme approach proposed by Li, Willmot, and Wong (2018). We further study the optimal prediction of $g_{\tau_b^+}$ in the $L_1$ sense, and find that the optimal stopping time is the first passage time above a level $y_b^{\ast}$, with an explicit characterization of the stopping boundary $y_b^{\ast}$. As examples, Brownian motion with drift and the Cramér–Lundberg model with exponential jumps are considered.

The Australian High Court has in general rejected the use of extrinsic historical material in the interpretation of the Constitution. Though it has consistently claimed that in interpreting a Constitutional provision it is giving effect to the intentions of the founders, it has not been prepared to turn to the convention debates, draft constitutional bills or other primary records in order to ascertain the founders' intentions. The intention is to be ascertained from the ordinary and natural meaning of the words themselves, relying on the proper legal methods of construction and interpretation. However, even when this rule was considered to be settled doctrine there were exceptions. In those cases where the words were ambiguous the Court could turn to the drafts of the Constitution “as a matter of history of legislation”. As well, convention debates could be referred to “for the purpose of seeing what was the subject matter of discussion, what was the evil to be remedied, and so forth”.

One area in which the rights of Australian workers have lagged behind their counterparts in other western democracies is that of protection against unfair dismissal. The common law action for breach of the contract of employment has, of course, been open to employees in common law countries including Australia but recognition of the inadequacy of this procedure has led to the introduction of statutory protection against dismissal in a number of common law jurisdictions including the United Kingdom. While some of the Australian States have sought to legislate in this area the protection available at federal level has, at least until recently, been inadequate.

This paper will explore the background to the federal dismissals jurisdiction in Australia and the recent developments which have extended the protection against unfair dismissal available within the Australian Conciliation and Arbitration system. At federal level, a dual system of redress for unfair dismissal has developed.

The Treblinka revolt has received extensive scholarly attention, though little of this work considers the resistance actions of women prisoners. In this article, I use spatial methods to reveal how Jews at Treblinka created three examples of what I term ‘places of resistance’ and how women supported each. Critically, this article demonstrates how studying these locations highlights the roles of women in resistance up to and including the famous uprising. Taking analyses of gender and memory further, I also examine how our scant knowledge of women's lives at Treblinka prompts consideration of archival silences, masculinity, and oral history practice.

What causes demographic misperceptions of minority populations? We anticipate that the extent to which members of the majority group perceive the minority group as a threat shapes their estimation of minority group size. While existing research argues that demographic misperceptions of minority groups can lead to a sense of threat, we argue that the opposite relationship may exist—that threat also causes demographic misperception. We test our argument using an experiment embedded in a survey of Muslims in Indonesia. We manipulate perceived threat of Christians in Indonesia and then ask respondents to estimate the size of the Christian population. While Muslims generally overestimated the size of the Christian population, we find that Muslims who felt a greater sense of threat estimated the Christian population to be significantly larger at both the national and provincial levels. This finding provides new insights on the directionality of the relationship between the widely acknowledged connection between threat and demographic misperceptions.

To be trite is to be worn out by constant use or repetition, or to be hackneyed or commonplace. The word “trite” is derived from the Latin word terere meaning essentially “to rub”. Thus, the word has physical associations, as if a trite remark actually erases its own origins because they are of no use anymore. Obviously the more used something is, the more trite it becomes, or so one would expect. There is even a built-in pejorative connotation, as to overuse a phrase, or resort to trite propositions can, in some cases, “rub” the listener the wrong way.

Since the very humble beginnings of the common law courts, judges have identified law that is trite. In the 15th century, Chief Justice Brian, in a case known only as T Pasch's case, said, in words that have since rung down the centuries:

The availability of reasons for decisions is an important part of recent developments in Commonwealth administration. As Mrs Burnett’s scholarly analysis shows, these developments have not been without their uncertainties. I would like to pursue a few of the issues raised in her paper and mention some issues associated with providing reasons for decisions in the Repatriation area.

There is much to be said for a person affected by a decision having a right to obtain full written reasons for the decision. This enables the person affected to find out why the particular decision has been made. It may also provide a possible basis for challenge to the decision. As Mrs Burnett notes, the need to give reasons has also been described as encouraging consistency and better quality in decision-making.

The right of petitioning Parliament is a fimdamental right of the citizen, allowing any individual or body of individuals to take grievances directly before Parliament. It is one of the most direct means of communication between the people and the Parliament. It is by this means that people can voice their concerns to the House on matters ofpublic interest.

Australian electoral legislation provides both a regulatory and punitive scheme designed to overcome electoral corruption and malpractice. Much of this legislation has been based on British models. The article commences by detailing the existing British legislation and its merits. Extended consideration is then given to the sections of Australian electoral legislation dealing with the conduct of candidates for election and their supporters. The former British legislation which has been imitated in various Australian jurisdictions is identified and the effectiveness of the present Australian electoral legislation is compared with that presently in force in the United Kingdom. As well, the principal electoral offences and controls on electoral expenditure in each of the States and the Commonwealth are considered at length. The analysis in this regard is complemented by a schedule to the article comparing the existence of, and penalties for, 48 electoral offences under various electoral statutes in Australia and the United Kingdom. Dr Finn concludes the article by arguing for reform in a number of specified areas of Australian electoral legislation.

In [15], using methods from ergodic theory, a longstanding conjecture of Erdős (see [5, Page 305]) about sumsets in large subsets of the natural numbers was resolved. In this paper, we extend this result to several important classes of amenable groups, including all finitely generated virtually nilpotent groups and all abelian groups $(G,+)$ with the property that the subgroup $2G := \{g+g : g\in G\}$ has finite index. We prove that in any group G from the above classes, any $A\subset G$ with positive upper Banach density contains a shifted product set of the form $\{tb_ib_j\colon i<j\}$, for some infinite sequence $(b_n)_{n\in \mathbb {N}}$ and some $t\in G$. In fact, we show this result for all amenable groups that posses a property which we call square absolute continuity. Our results provide answers to several questions and conjectures posed in [13].

Erskine May's Parliamentary Practice, the procedural bible of the House of Commons, is about to lose its place as the inevitable reference guide for Australian parliamentarians. At the end of 1981 the House of Representatives Practice was published, joining the long established Australian Senate Practice to provide the first complete Australian guide to the procedures of both Houses of the Commonwealth Parliament. The old editions of May's Parliamentary Practice, reciting the procedure of the Commons at the turn of the century, have some residual importance for the Federal Parliament (of which more later) but that too is likely to disappear. Within a few years, May's will disappear from the shelves of parliamentary clerks in Canberra and be relegated to library shelves for the benefit of students of British politics and parliamentary affairs.

The Australian replacement of May's has been a long time coming. Mr JR Odgers produced his first edition of Australian Senate Practice in 1953. Revised editions followed fairly regularly, the fourth appearing in 1972 and the fifth (and still current) edition in 1976. But it was not until 1975 that the House of Representatives decided that it was proper to begin working on an equivalent and to put on record some of its answers to Mr Odgers.