AustLII is a free access online service which has operated since 1995 as a joint facility provided by UNSW and UTS Law Faculties , and now provides over 500 databases, with usage of over 700,000 page accesses per day. The Colonial Legal History Library project is therefore being built within a large and mature research infrastructure, and this presents challenges as well as advantages. In particular, many of the AustLII databases cover the whole period from the formation of a colony to the present, so the databases for this Library have to be ‘virtual’ databases extracted from this larger corpus.

The paper explains the construction, content and features of the first version of the Library, which as of July 2012 contains 12 databases including one case law database from each of the seven colonies (including New Zealand), some of which are ‘recovered’ cases from newspaper reports, the complete annual legislation to 1900 from three of the colonies, plus legal scholarship concerning the colonial era. These databases provide over 20,000 documents so far, and the Victorian Government Gazette 1851-1900 another 200,000. The Library also includes the LawCite citator, which allows the subsequent citation history of any colonial case to be tracked, including if cited by courts outside Australasia.

The medium term aim of this part of the ARC project (which extends to 1950 in its full scope) is to include all legislation, reported cases, and cases which can be ‘recovered’, from the inception of each colony to 1900. Scholarship (old and new) and key source materials are also being added, as budgets permit. We hope that the Library will be a leader in the creation of legal history resources from the colonial era.

The Workshop was held, under circumstances of uncertainty, two weeks prior to the Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and Meeting of Parties to the Kyoto Protocol to be held in Bali, Indonesia, from 3-14 December. This summit will set the stage for a comprehensive agreement that tackles climate change on all fronts following the expiry of the first commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol in 2012. The Workshop was also held immediately preceding the Australian federal election. Climate change was a significant issue during the election campaign and the incoming Rudd Government has committed itself to ratification of the Kyoto Protocol.

It is for this reason that the question must be asked: why are some developing countries and LDCs growing while others are essentially stagnating in a ‘poverty trap’? The simple answer is that these stagnant countries generally have, inter alia, low levels of education and training, a decrepit or non-existent infrastructure, ever-present (or often recurring) ethnic and civil instability, and high levels of corruption and mismanagement in both the public and private sector. While the reasons stated may be causes and may be symptoms, no one can for certain state all the reasons why some nations have succeeded and others have failed.

This article does not presume to know or attempt to solve all the problems of the developing world. This article is also not meant to be a definitive study, but instead merely introduces the issues and, while offering recommendations and conclusions, hopes to spark genuine debate. More specifically, this article suggests several basic international conditions which appear to be necessary to improving living standards and growth: (1) open and liberalised economic engagement; (2) export-oriented trade strategies; and (3) an appropriate legal and regulatory framework.

These observations are perhaps all truisms, but they are often ignored. We still await a sociology of the rule of law, while in the meantime we pour huge sums of money into inadequately grounded, if well meant, attempts to deliver it. Were we to seek such a sociology we would not have a huge number of sources. One place to start is the work of Philip Selznick. That recommendation is at large, and even in relation to this subject could refer to much of Selznick’s work. In this essay, however, I will focus primarily on one book that raises these issues most centrally: Law, Society, and Industrial Justice. It has nothing specific to say about how to implant the rule of law in societies that lack it and have been little acquainted with it. However, those with such ambitions might well pause to attend to the sociological complexities this work reveals in a relatively modest proposal: to generate the rule of law in a well regulated domain of life, industrial relations, in one of the most rule of law rich countries in the world, the United States. Their reliance on state law, and ignorance of non-state law, might then come to acquire some recalibration. In a world full of lawyers and policy advisers propagating state-centered institutional recipes for the rule of law, and then affecting disappointment that benighted beneficiaries still violate or deliberately ignore it, a reminder of the complexity of non-state conditions for the rule of law might be salutary.

These developments are counterbalance by the growth of new market-savvy classes of consumers who are willing and able to sue brand name producers in class and other actions.

Faced with these Twenty First Century developments, courts struggle to find middle ground between regulating mass transactions in fairness to consumers and facilitating free commerce.

Analyzing adhesion contracts in light of the evolving law of unconscionability, this article proposes ways in which to regulate mass transactions while preserving a liberty of contract that is essential to a liberal democracy.

Part 1 of this article provides an overview of the extent of capital punishment in today’s world, identifying those countries that retain the death penalty and discussing the number of death sentences imposed and carried out in those countries. Part 2 briefly reviews the principal arguments for and against capital punishment. Part 3 summarises the international law on capital punishment, describing the trend toward its abolition and the significant restrictions under international law on its imposition, even when it is still permissible for a state to impose it. Part 4 briefly discusses the death penalty in Australian law and Australia’s international obligations in relation to the death penalty. Part 5 considers some of the complications that arise for Australian authorities in criminal law enforcement cooperation with countries which retain the death penalty. Part 6 examines the approach of the current Australian Government to the death penalty abroad, and the apparent inconsistencies that have emerged in recent years.

I provide nothing like that here, only some reasons to seek it. The argument is briefly this. The proper way to approach the rule of law is not to offer, as lawyers typically do, a list of characteristics of laws and legal institutions supposedly necessary, if not sufficient, for the rule of law to exist; let me call that the anatomical approach. Rather, one should begin with teleology and end with sociology. That is, I suggest we start by asking what we might want the rule of law for, by which I mean not external ends that it might serve, such as economic growth or democracy, but something like its telos, the point of the enterprise, goals internal to, immanent in the concept. Only then should we move to ask what sorts of things need to happen for us to achieve such a state of affairs, and only then move to ask what we need in order to get it. That third question, the bottom line, as it were, will of course involve legal institutions but it cannot be answered without looking beyond them to the societies in which they function, the ways they function there, and what else happens there which interacts with and affects the sway of law. For the rule of law to exist, still more to flourish and be secure, many things beside the law matter, and since societies differ in many ways, so will those things.

No new Bill was introduced before Parliament rose for an election called for November 24 2007. The fate of the 'access card' proposal therefore depends on the election outcome. For the moment, the Bill's opponents have succeeded in their goal of preventing the government from passing the Bill while it still has a Parliamentary majority.

This article concentrates on those aspects of the Exposure Draft Bill which (directly or indirectly) determine the scope and purposes of the identity system which it will create, and in particular what opportunities they provide for expansion of those functions and purposes beyond those the government claims the Bill is about. In other words, this is an article principally about the opportunities for function creep. Although it contains some detailed recommendations for how the Bill could be improved, that is not an endorsement of any Bill containing such improvements. This Bill should be abandoned in favour of a more limited and less dangerous approach.

This paper gives a brief outline of the challenges involved in developing AsianLII and the facilities it provides, and then outlines a demonstration of how it can be used for both comparative law research across all Asian countries and for research concerning the law of one country (Japan is used as the example). The proposed future development of AsianLII is outlined, particularly in relation to multi-lingual resources and its role in assisting the development of new free access Legal Information Institutes in Asia. The paper was given at the Japanese launch of AsianLII in August 2007 at Meiji University, Tokyo.

This commentary explores the notion of copyright law as the new constitutional law of cyberspace. The case for a public-minded copyright law is explored historically and in realpolitik terms, but the conclusion is that the chance for copyright playing a constructive formal regulatory role across the globe is exceedingly weak.

This chapter takes concerns about the negative influence of copyright on innovation and access to new media services seriously. However, my interest is not in proselytising the evils of Big Media, or analysing the evidence of global media’s capture of the policy agenda. Further, the discussion of copyright and digital broadcasting is all too present-minded and too focused on current external influences on the law, and especially US influences and comparisons. This chapter addresses the contemporary Australian situation by reconsidering the past of broadcast copyright—its introduction into the Copyright Act 1968 (Cth) and jurisprudential development in case law. This jurisprudence is important because, though perhaps too obvious to mention, it is still primarily the development of exclusive rights to copyright subject matter that establishes the means by which media owners effect control over access to their programs in Australia today.

The paper argues that all these offences are impermissibly broad and vague and rely on allegations of mental states of mind to criminalise actions otherwise lawful.