Honest and reasonable mistake as a defence to disciplinary charges
Senior Member Howell decided last year in Legal Services Commissioner v RMB [2010] VCAT 51 that there is a mens rea element to professional discipline offences under the Legal Profession Act, 2004, in...
View ArticleLawyer referred for appearance of complicity in husband client’s fraud on wife
In Lambert & Jackson [2010] FamCA 357, a Family Court judge sitting in Sydney made the following orders: ’1. There be a further listing before me on 24 May 2010… for the purposes of giving Ms Y an...
View ArticleCivil Procedure Bill
The civil procedure landscape is changing fast. A new Evidence Act. The establishment of the Costs Court. The Federal Court’s rocket docket. The Supreme Court’s Commercial Court. The abolition of...
View ArticleA new Australian legal ethics blog
A warm welcome to the blogosphere for the Queensland Law Society’s Ethics Blog, which is in its first posts, but attracts an impressive callibre of comments. The blog has a post about a recent, rare,...
View ArticleProsecutors’ duties in professional discipline cases
There is an interesting article by Ian Wheatley at (2008) 16 Journal of Law and Medicine 193. Titled ‘The Criminalisation of Professional Misconduct Under the Health Professions Registration Act 2005...
View ArticleLegal Services Commissioner’s obligations of fairness
I have previously reported Justice Finkelstein’s views about the obligations of those who prosecute proceedings for a penalty (‘‘I would hold that a regulatory body that brings a civil proceeding to...
View ArticleThe civil and disciplinary consequences of making an allegation of serious...
Friends, I need your help, again. Certain promises I made to write about and present on the civil and disciplinary consequences of making allegations of serious wrongdoing (e.g. fraud) without a...
View ArticleWhite Industries v Flower & Hart: unfounded allegations of fraud
This post is a case note of Justice Goldberg’s famous decision in White Industries (Qld) Pty Ltd v Flower & Hart (1998) 156 ALR 169; [1998] FCA 806 as well as of associated decisions and...
View ArticleWASCA on the kind of recklessness in making statements which amounts to...
Traditionally, the law of professional discipline has differed from the law of negligence in three profound ways. First, its aim is the protection of the public (though the policy in favour of...
View ArticleJury verdict overturned by VSCA because of insinuation in cross-examination...
In Green v Emergency Services Telecommunications Authority [2014] VSCA 207, the Victorian Court of Appeal today overturned a jury’s verdict following a nine-day trial. There had been a miscarriage of...
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