Indigenous offenders are heavily over-represented in the Australian and Canadian criminal justice systems. In the case of R v Gladue, the Supreme Court of Canada held that sentencing judges are to recognise the adverse systemic and background factors that many Aboriginal Canadians face and consider all reasonable alternatives to imprisonment in light of this. In...

One of the bases for the view that Commonwealth powers should be interpreted broadly is the idea that it is wrong to draw negative implications from positive grants of power. The paper argues that far from being wrong to draw negative implications from positive grants of power it is necessary to do so in that...

Fraudulent phoenix activity and sham contracting are well-recognised issues in the context of protecting employees’ remuneration entitlements, both during the life of a company and after it has collapsed through insolvency. To date, much of the emphasis in dealing with these problems has been on the businesses’ controllers. This paper takes a different approach and...

Changes in the conception of the Australian court system occurred in parallel with fundamental shifts in the creation, formulation and discernment of national identity. Abstract The history of Australian federal courts, from the creation of the Commonwealth Court of Conciliation and Arbitration in 1904 until now, is part of the broader history of how Australians...

This article explores the dynamic by which once exceptional measures become normalised and then extended to new extremes. Abstract Since September 11, Australia’s federal Parliament has enacted a range of exceptional measures aimed at preventing terrorism. These measures include control orders, which were not designed or intended for use outside of the terrorism context. What...