Personal property securities (draft ) bill 2008 - problems and why it will not work

Attempts are under way to condense more than 70 pieces of federal, state and territory legislation on personal property securities (PPS) into a single Federal Act. The revised second draft of the PPS Bill 2008 was released in November calling for further public comments by December 2008. The aim of this article is to highlight some of the important instances where further intensive drafting is needed. It draws out some key issues that have not been addressed that may assist in further revising the bill. Overall, the author firmly believes that the bill is far from perfect, that much work is still needed to improve clarity and readability and to minimise any uncertainty in the use of certain terms that are repetitive and obsolete. The article concludes with some useful references that Australia could perhaps learn from the problems currently experienced in New Zealand under its own PPS Act.

The new law of torts: case book

The New Law of Torts Case Book is a collection of edited cases, designed as a companion to The New Law of Torts textbook. It provides students with access to a carefully selected range of case extracts of seminal judgements that have created and shaped the modern law of torts, provides examples of judicial reasoning and illustrates approaches to doctrines that govern the interpretation and construction of statutes. Cases extracted in this volume allow the readers to form their own opinions and perspectives on themes and issues presented in the textbook. New to this edition Expanded collection of case extracts that mirror the table of contents of principles text. Recent key cases that have been added include: Wallace v Cam [2013] HCA19 – relates to remoteness of damage and causation and proof of breach Strong v Woolworths [2012] HCA 5; 246 CLR 182 – relates to Breach of Duty of Care and Causation and Proof of Breach Levy v Watt and Anor [2014] VSCA 60 – relates to Torts of Intentional Interference with Goods and Personal Property and Defences to Intentional Torts

Locke, Kierkegaard, and the phenomenology of personal identity

Personal Identity theorists as diverse as Derek Parfit, Marya Schechtman and Galen Strawson have noted that the experiencing subject (the locus of present psychological experience) and the person (a human being with a career/narrative extended across time) are not necessarily coextensive. Accordingly, we can become psychologically alienated from, and fail to experience a sense of identity with, the person we once were or will be. This presents serious problems for Locke’s original account of “sameness of consciousness” constituting personal identity, given the distinctly normative (and indeed eschatological) focus of his discussion. To succeed, the Lockean project needs to identify some phenomenal property of experience that can constitute a sense of identity with the self figured in all moments to which consciousness can be extended. I draw upon key themes in Kierkegaard’s phenomenology of moral imagination to show that Kierkegaard describes a phenomenal quality of experience that unites the experiencing subject with its past and future, regardless of facts about psychological change across time. Yet Kierkegaard’s account is fully normative, recasting affective identification with past/future selves as a moral task rather than something merely psychologically desirable (Schechtman) or utterly contingent (Parfit, Strawson).