Defences in medical negligence : to what extent has tort law reform in Australia limited the liability of health professionals?

Tort law reform has resulted in legislation being passed by all Australian jurisdictions in the past decade implementing the recommendations contained in the Ipp Report. The report was in response to a perceived crisis in medical indemnity insurance. The objective was to restrict and limit liability in negligence actions. This paper will consider to what extent the reforms have impacted on the liability of health professionals in medical negligence actions. After an analysis of the legislation, it will be argued in this paper that while there has been some limitation and restriction, courts have generally interpreted the civil liability reforms in compliance with the common law. It has been the impact of statutory limits on the assessment of damages through thresholds and caps which has limited the liability of health professionals in medical negligence actions.

The Law and Governance of Water Resources : The Challenge of Sustainability

To achieve the sustainable use and development of water resources is a daunting challenge for both the global and local communities. It requires commitments by all groups within the international, national and local communities from their own particular, possibly conflicting, perspectives. Without a set of coherent legal arrangements designed to ensure effective governance of water resources, their sustainable use and development are unlikely to be achieved. This study looks at how the legal arrangements for managing water resources have evolved across the continents over hundreds of years; their relevance for contemporary society; how the norms of current international and national legal regimes are responding; and, most importantly, how legal rights and duties should be structured so as to achieve sustainability in the future.

Safeguarding rural Australia : addressing masculinity and violence in rural settings : consequences of violent harm in a rural Australian context : analysis of secondary data analysis

This report is an update of an earlier one produced in January 2010 (see Carrington et al. 2010) which remains as an ePrint through the project’s home page. The report considers extant data which have been sourced with respect to some of the consequences of violent acts, incidents, harms and risky behaviour involving males living in regional and remote Australia and which were available in public data bases at production.

Charity law, advocacy and the aid/watch decision : compatibility of charitable purposes and political objects — the view from Australia

Introduction In 1952 the Nathan report stated that: Some of the most valuable activities of voluntary societies consist, however, in the fact that they may be able to stand aside from and criticize State action or inaction, in the interests of the inarticulate man in the street. Some 60 years later it remained the case that if a voluntary society wanted to gain or retain charitable status then, contrary to the Nathan report, the one thing it could not do was set itself up with the purpose of criticizing State action or inaction. This legal position was adopted by the authorities in Australia with the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) noting in Taxation Ruling TR2005/21: 102. An institution or fund is not charitable if its purpose is advocating a political party or cause, attempting to change the law or government policy, or propagating or promoting a particular point of view. So, why, if it is such a valuable activity, have governments steadfastly refused to allow charities to have as their purpose the freedom to advocate in this way and how has this situation been affected by the recent High Court of Australia decision in Aid/Watch v Commissioner of Taxation? This article proposes to address such questions. Beginning with some background history, it explains that, initially, the current constraints did not apply. Then it looks at the nature of these constraints: how does the law define what constitutes the type of political activity that a charity must not undertake? What is the rationale for prohibition? How has the judiciary contributed to the development of the law in this area in recent years? This will lead into a consideration of the Aid/Watch case and the implications arising from the recent final decision. The article concludes by reflecting on what has changed and why the view on this contentious matter now looks different from Australia.

Section 64 of the Property Law Act 1974 (Qld) and the reluctant buyer

The decision of the Court of Appeal in Dunworth v Mirvac Qld Pty Ltd [2011] QCA 200 arose from unusual circumstances associated with the flood in Brisbane earlier this year. Maris Dunworth (‘the buyer’) agreed to purchase a ground floor residential apartment located beside the Brisbane River at Tennyson from Mirvac Queensland Pty Ltd (‘Mirvac’). The original date for completion was 12 May 2009. In earlier proceedings, the buyer had alleged that she had been induced to purchase the apartment by false, misleading and deceptive representations. This claim was dismissed and an order for specific performance was made with a new completion date of 8 February 2011...

Engaging law students to promote psychological health

Recent empirical evidence suggests that concern for the psychological health of law students is well justified. Traditionally, the legal curriculum has focused on the provision of substantive legal doctrinal knowledge. This approach has not always engaged students positively with their learning of law. This article considers some strategies that can be adopted by Law Faculties to better engage students with their legal education in order to promote their psychological health. These strategies are: ensuring that active learning occurs in lectures, demonstrating concern for students and their learning and skillful management of student expectations and the learning environment. Further, some self-help strategies that students can adopt for themselves are discussed. Combined, these strategies will enable students to engage more positively with their legal education.

National Environmental Law Review Issue 2011: 3, Editorial: Federal Developments

Clean Energy Agreement of the MPCCC On 10 July 2011, details of the Multi-Party Climate Change Committee’s Clean Energy Agreement for implementing a carbon price were released. This included an agreed package of measures that the Committee considered would enable Australia to meet its emissions reduction targets in an environmentally and economically efficient way. A copy of the agreement can be found on the website of the Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency...

An ontology-based mining approach for user search intent discovery

Discovering proper search intents is a vi- tal process to return desired results. It is constantly a hot research topic regarding information retrieval in recent years. Existing methods are mainly limited by utilizing context-based mining, query expansion, and user profiling techniques, which are still suffering from the issue of ambiguity in search queries. In this pa- per, we introduce a novel ontology-based approach in terms of a world knowledge base in order to construct personalized ontologies for identifying adequate con- cept levels for matching user search intents. An iter- ative mining algorithm is designed for evaluating po- tential intents level by level until meeting the best re- sult. The propose-to-attempt approach is evaluated in a large volume RCV1 data set, and experimental results indicate a distinct improvement on top precision after compared with baseline models.

Physicality in Australian Patent Law

It is generally understood that the patent system exists to encourage the conception and disclosure of new and useful inventions embodied in machines and other physical devices, along with new methods that physically transform matter from one state to another. What is not well understood is whether, and to what extent, the patent system is to encourage and protect the conception and disclosure of inventions that are non-physical methods – namely those that do not result in a physical transformation of matter. This issue was considered in Grant v Commissioner of Patents. In that case the Full Court of the Federal Court of Australia held that an invention must involve a physical effect or transformation to be patentable subject matter. In doing so, it introduced a physicality requirement into Australian law. What this article seeks to establish is whether the court’s decision is consistent with the case law on point. It does so by examining the key common law cases that followed the High Court’s watershed decision in National Research Development Corporation v Commissioner of Patents, the undisputed authoritative statement of principle in regard to the patentable subject matter standard in Australia. This is done with a view to determining whether there is anything in those cases that supports the view that the Australian patentable subject matter test contains a physicality requirement.

Relevance feature discovery for text analysis

It is a big challenge to guarantee the quality of discovered relevance features in text documents for describing user preferences because of the large number of terms, patterns, and noise. Most existing popular text mining and classification methods have adopted term-based approaches. However, they have all suffered from the problems of polysemy and synonymy. Over the years, people have often held the hypothesis that pattern-based methods should perform better than term- based ones in describing user preferences, but many experiments do not support this hypothesis. This research presents a promising method, Relevance Feature Discovery (RFD), for solving this challenging issue. It discovers both positive and negative patterns in text documents as high-level features in order to accurately weight low-level features (terms) based on their specificity and their distributions in the high-level features. The thesis also introduces an adaptive model (called ARFD) to enhance the exibility of using RFD in adaptive environment. ARFD automatically updates the system's knowledge based on a sliding window over new incoming feedback documents. It can efficiently decide which incoming documents can bring in new knowledge into the system. Substantial experiments using the proposed models on Reuters Corpus Volume 1 and TREC topics show that the proposed models significantly outperform both the state-of-the-art term-based methods underpinned by Okapi BM25, Rocchio or Support Vector Machine and other pattern-based methods.

Mobile applications of focused link discovery

Interaction with a mobile device remains difficult due to inherent physical limitations. This dif-ficulty is particularly evident for search, which re-quires typing. We extend the One-Search-Only search paradigm by adding a novel link-browsing scheme built on top of automatic link discovery. A prototype was built for iPhone and tested with 12 subjects. A post-use interview survey suggests that the extended paradigm improves the mobile information seeking experience.

Using cost-effective multimedia to create engaging learning experiences in law and other disciplines

This is the final report of an Australian Learning and Teaching Council Teaching Fellowship which addressed the needs of two separate groups of learners: (1) final year law students studying ethics and (2) law academics and other interested educators in higher education wishing to use information and communication technologies (ICT) to create engaging learning environments for their students but lacking the capacity to do so. The Fellowship resulted in final year law students being infused with an improved appreciation of ethical practice than they receive from traditional lecture/tutorial means by the development of an integrated program of blended learning including an online program entitled "Entry into Valhalla". This "ethics capstone‟ utilises multimedia produced using cost effective resources (including the "Second Life" virtual environment) to create engaging, contextualised learning experiences. The Fellowship also constructed the knowledge of producing cost-effective multimedia projects in other law academics and other educators in higher education by staff development activities comprising workshops, conference presentations and an interactive website using the "Entry into Valhalla" program as a case study exemplar.

Developing a transition pedagogy : intentional curriculum design in first and final year law programs

This chapter will first consider the rationale for a transition pedagogy for first and final year law students. It then discusses the elements of a transition pedagogy for both years, noting the synergies and differences between programs designed to assist transition into and out of a law degree. In doing so, the authors attempt to explore the extent to which the first year curriculum principles identified by Sally Kift under an Australian Learning and Teaching Council (ALTC) Senior Fellowship may also be applied to the final year university experience. During the course of the discussion, examples are drawn from universities and Law Schools in Australia and internationally which seek to address these imperatives...