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Archive for January, 2011

Corrections corrected

Thursday, January 27th, 2011

Remember the prisoner who sued the Department of Corrections for confiscating and destroying his Cosmopolitan magazine? (Two hand-drawn pictures were also destroyed). He won. Turns out, it was an easy call. Under the Corrections Act, prisoner property can only be destroyed if the prisoner fails to comply with a requirement to remove it, and the […]

Devlin name-suppression beat-up

Tuesday, January 25th, 2011

Russell Brown has a terrific post demonstrating yet again the way the media have lost the plot about name suppression. He notes that no judge ever actually made a determination of the suppression application on the merits: an interim order was made by consent so that the application could be properly argued later. I suspect […]

Tweeting in court

Tuesday, January 25th, 2011

The English Chief Justice, Lord Judge (yep, that’s his name), has laid down some interim guidelines on tweeting in court. In short, he suggests that tweeting won’t usually prejudice the administration of justice, so it seems that permission should usually be granted. On the other hand, in some circumstances there may be reason to ban […]

No ordinary Joe

Monday, January 24th, 2011

I interviewed Justice Joe Williams for The Court Report, about being a judge, his time as Chair of the Waitangi Tribunal, and about being the only judge on the bench with a top-20 hit. His responses are thoughtful and moving, I think.

Erin Leigh succeeds in defamation appeal

Sunday, January 23rd, 2011

The Court of Appeal’s decision is pretty much exactly what I predicted here. The briefing paper and the oral briefing about PR staffer Erin Leigh’s departure from the Minstry of the Environment are – contrary to Dobson J’s ruling last year – capable of defaming her. But her negligence claim is a loser. The real […]

Without prejudice?

Friday, January 21st, 2011

Isn’t much of the coverage of the Auckland child abuse case based on the premise that crimes have been committed, and implicitly, that they were by the parents (and another family member)? That includes some of the statements from the government, as where Social Development Minister Paula Bennett is reported as saying that it was […]

ECHR upholds Campbell, criticises success fees

Wednesday, January 19th, 2011

The European Court of Human rights has endorsed the House of Lords majority finding in the Naomi Campbell case that her privacy was breached by the publication of photographs of her outside a Narcotics Anonymous meeting – and that this was not a disproportionate interference with the paper’s freedom of expression. (There’s lots of language […]