Mr Justice Holmes' view that payment of taxes should not be begrudged-as they are the price of civilisation-is of course not shared by the vast majority of tax-paying citizens.

In 2020, amid aggressive and inflammatory political discourse and an unprecedented wave of violent attacks against migration Non-Governmental Organizations and their staff, the Greek Government sought to establish a new legal framework for the registration of Non-Governmental Organizations active in the fields of international protection, migration and social inclusion, and their members. This Article aims at providing an overview of the EU-law based litigation brought by Greek Civil Society organizations to challenge the new framework for breaching fundamental rights, and at exploring its effects beyond the Court proceedings. This Article concludes that, counterintuitively, the existence of pending litigation against the Regulation establishing the NGO Registries hampered advocacy on this issue with the European Commission.

There has been renewed interest in the constitutional dimensions of choice of law. This interest was reignited by the High Court’s decision in John Pfeiffer Pty Ltd v Rogerson, where the Court appealed to ‘constitutional factors’ as guiding the selection of the lex loci delicti as a common law choice of law rule in intra-national tort cases. While the central importance of the overarching constitutional framework to intra-national choice of law questions may be accepted, the High Court struggled to identify with precision the relevance of constitutional provisions and implications for the choice of law inquiry. In particular, it failed to respond adequately to concerns expressed in earlier majority judgments about the continued capacity of State legislatures to direct their courts as to the legal standards to be applied in a case involving out-of-state elements. Because of the fact pattern that arose in Pfeiffer, the High Court was able to avoid the more difficult questions that arise in intra-national choice of law cases, particularly the question of which legal standards apply when there is an ‘inconsistency’ between two or more State legislative provisions.

In 1971, Blackburn J., delivering a swingeing judgment in the Supreme Court of the Northern Territory, held that the members of three Arnhem I and clans had no legally recognizable rights in their ancestral lands, and thereby decided what was thought to be the first case brought by Australian aboriginals seeking legal recognition of their customary land rights.

British settlements were first established in Australia in 1788. Ever since it is a notorious fact that aboriginals have been consistently deprived of their land by settlers, miners and governments. The surprising thing therefore, to lawyers unfamiliar with the history of Australian race relations, is that aboriginal rights in land do not appear to have been asserted in the courts by aboriginal plaintiffs before the present proceedings began. The absence of reported cases dealing specifically with the rights of Australian aboriginals in their lands is all the more exceptional in the light of the wide range of decisions on indigenous claims in other murisdictions.

In 1994 the New South Wales Parliament passed an extraordinary piece of legislation, the demise of which one is hard-pressed to mourn. Be that as it may, the means by which that demise was achieved are hardly to be celebrated, as the High Court decision which accomplished the task represents a further entrenchment of the unfortunate doctrine of “incompatibility” introduced the previous year in Grollo v Palmer and Others. In short, the decision in Kable v Director of Public Prosecutions (NSW) extends the doctrine of incompatibility to State courts so that State parliaments, although they remain entitled to usurp the functions of those courts, cannot assign to those courts any powers whose exercise is incompatible with the judicial power of the Commonwealth vested in those courts by Commonwealth legislation. In this respect, the decision represents the worst of both worlds by placing severe limitations on State courts without any corresponding limitations on State parliaments (except to the extent they may wish to confer powers on the courts in question). The result is that the States have judiciaries which are half-independent, and that half is the less important half.

Leaders play a central role in world politics, and threat perception is a crucial element in the study and practice of International Relations (IR). Yet existing accounts of how leaders perceive threats are inadequate, drawing on an incomplete notion of leaders as (ir)rational information processors that pays no attention to the leader’s experience of danger as it unfolds in time and how such experience is structured. By integrating a framework developed by linguist Ray Jackendoff to describe the experience of language with the study of danger in International Relations, and by employing an interpretive textual analysis technique to danger descriptions made by world leaders embedded in different historical and cultural settings constructing different security dangers, I develop and illustrate the ‘danger framework’. In describing the unique features with which leaders experience security dangers, the danger framework theorises the qualia of danger experience and how it is organised into the conscious field of leaders. In doing so, the paper makes progress on three problems for existing accounts of threat perception in IR, illuminates important research puzzles, and provides the literature on experience and Ontological Security Studies (OSS) with micro-foundations.

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.

The Constitution of Australia embodies a liberal political theory that the freedom of the citizen is dependent on the separation and distribution of the powers of the state between different institutions - legislative, executive and judicial. With the possible exception of a democratically elected legislature, none of these institutions should dominate the way in which the powers of the remainder are exercised. For the safeguard of personal liberty, each should act as a check and balance against the over-exercise of power by the remainder, and especially by the executive government of the day.

This principle - the separation of powers - was inherited originally from England but developed considerably in the United States. It has been regarded as a fundamental element of the Constitution since the act of federation in 1901. Recognition of the principle reputedly reached a high point in Boilermakers, a decision of the High Court of Australia in 1956.

The Constitution of Ceylon2 confers on the Parliament of Ceylon full power ‘ to make laws for the peace, order and good government of the Island ’. Section 29 (4) of the Constitution provides that.

In an increasingly global economy, foreign anti-competitive practices pose just as much of a threat to the economic wellbeing of Australians as domestic anti-competitive practices. Multinationals which transcend national boundaries are now major players in many different markets. Furthermore, continuing globalisation means that the number of commercial activities with transnational implications will rise.

The Trade Practices Act 1974 (Cth) (‘TPA’) contains a provision that expressly gives the Act extraterritorial operation. Section 5(1) provides that the competition law prohibitions contained in Part IV extend to conduct engaged in outside Australia by bodies corporate incorporated, or carrying on a business, in Australia. With the exception of the prohibitions against cartel conduct, the extraterritorial operation of the prohibitions against the major forms of anti-competitive conduct is even broader. Since the Act’s inception, the prohibitions against price and non-price vertical restraints have extended to the engaging in conduct outside Australia by persons and bodies corporate (whether incorporated, or carrying on a business, in Australia or not) in relation to the supply of goods or services to persons within Australia.

The latest statement from the High Court on duties of excise poses an interesting question with regard to the fiscal relationship between Commonwealth and State governments. The absence of fiscal accountability in all levels of government in Australia serves to frustrate the objectives of the federal system. While the decision in Ngo Ngo Ha v New South Wales (Ha) brings some clarity to a confusing area, the High Court's adoption of a broad approach to s 90 of the Constitution has the effect of increasing the disparity between the revenue and expenditure of Commonwealth and State governments. In light of the economic and political implications of the decision, it must be asked whether the correct purpose has been attributed to the section.

Given an irreducible projective variety X, the covering gonality of X is the least gonality of an irreducible curve $E\subset X$ passing through a general point of X. In this paper, we study the covering gonality of the k-fold symmetric product $C^{(k)}$ of a smooth complex projective curve C of genus $g\geq k+1$. It follows from a previous work of the first author that the covering gonality of the second symmetric product of C equals the gonality of C. Using a similar approach, we prove the same for the $3$-fold and the $4$-fold symmetric product of C.

A crucial point in the proof is the study of the Cayley–Bacharach condition on Grassmannians. In particular, we describe the geometry of linear subspaces of $\mathbb {P}^n$ satisfying this condition, and we prove a result bounding the dimension of their linear span.

Courts have recognised that the circumstances in which they may receive and make use of evidence of parliamentary proceedings are restricted. The restrictions have been held to be required by Article 9 of the English Bill of Rights 1689. This Article is part of the law of all the Australian polities and it gives expression to one of the most important privileges of parliaments. Article 9 provides

In Prebble v New Zealand Television Ltd the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, on appeal from New Zealand, held that Article 9 does more than accord to participants in parliamentary proceedings an immunity from liability for statements made by them in the course of those proceedings. It means also “that parties to litigation, by whomsoever commenced, cannot bring into question anything said or done in the House by suggesting (whether by direct evidence, cross examination, inference or submission) that the action or words were inspired by improper motives or were untrue or misleading”.

Corporate regulation is front-page news in Australia. In recent years we have witnessed the unedifying debate between the Federal and State governments about how the responsibility for, and benefits of regulating companies and securities law should be allocated. Federal Parliamentary committees have conducted inquiries into the law relating to directors' duties, insider trading, and (currently) minority shareholders' rights. The chairman of the National Companies and Securities Commission and the Australian Securities Commission, Mr Tony Hartnell, has gained frequent publicity and support for his concern to “deal with the excesses of the past”.

As this brief survey indicates, the renewed concern about corporate regulation has tended to focus on the task of defining and controlling the conduct of some company personnel (directors, managers, and their advisers) in order to protect the interests of other corporate players (particularly shareholders and creditors). This focus is not surprising, but where does it leave the corporation?

In this article, Mr Justice Kirby surveys two major issues which are before the Australian Law Reform Commission in its Reference to reform defamation laws. First, he suggests that any reform requires revision of procedures to deliver remedies that are apt for damage to reputation. Unless the judicial system can produce speedier redress and more relevant remedies, it is suggested that administrative or other regulation will replace court procedures. Secondly, the article explores the problems arising in the age of mass communications from Australia's eight different systems of defamation law. After weighing the arguments for and against a uniform code, it is suggested that the present disparity promotes confusion, uncertainty, self-censorship and forum shopping. Four methods of achieving a uniform code are explored. These include a return to the common law, reference of power to the Commonwealth by the States, an attempt to secure agreement with the States on uniform laws and the use of a number of Commonwealth powers to support a national Act. As the vehicle chosen will affect the law proposed, it is suggested that the choice can not be delayed.