Search

The Defence Special Undertakings Act 1952 (Cth) is a draconian piece of Cold War legislation originally passed to provide security for British atomic testing in Australia. There are only two known prosecutions under the Act, both involving Christian pacifists entering the Pine Gap prohibited area. In 2007, the first ever convictions under the Act were overturned on appeal. A second prosecution has now commenced. This article considers the history and context of the current prosecutions and contends that the Act is being used to suppress contemporary dissent in a period in which the Australian government already faces criticism of its treatment of the right to protest.

Environmental destruction and climate change are driving new waves of environmental activism. In response, governments in several Australian states have enacted legislation designed to penalise and silence political protest. This article analyses Tasmania’s anti-protest laws and considers how the United Nations and scholars have reacted to them. We argue that protest suppression laws such as these reflect a neoliberal rationality which conceptualises society in market terms. This mode of thinking perceives protest as market interference rather than civic participation. Accordingly, anti-protest laws seek to secure the rights and interests of corporations to unimpeded market access.

Tobacco has been recognized as the number one cause of preventable death in America and results in almost 5.2 million years of potential life lost each year. The use of tobacco products is highly correlated with pulmonary disease, cardiovascular disease, and other forms of chronic illness in America. New tobacco products are trending in the tobacco market such as the water pipe/hookah and e-cigarettes. With e-cigarettes and other newer forms of tobacco on the rise, it is important to look at the underlying factors for using all kinds of tobacco products as a means of prevention. Certain adult attachment styles (secure, preoccupied, dismissing-avoidant, and fearful-avoidant) in emotionally meaningful relationships could be indicators for physical illness, mental illness, and even addiction. This study investigated whether or not there is a relationship between tobacco use and attachment style. Based on a university-wide survey that was sent out at a university in Appalachia with 522 participants, demographic data revealed 68.5% (n = 358) did not currently use tobacco products. Of those who did currently use tobacco products 54.5% (n = 90) were male, 84.8% (n = 140) were undergraduate students, and 66.7% (n = 110) were between the ages of 18-25. For individuals who used tobacco 23.5% (n = 38) were in the secure attachment group, 27.8% (n = 45) were in the dismissing-avoidant attachment group, 30.2% (n = 49) were in the fearful-avoidant attachment group, and 18.5% (n = 30) were in the preoccupied attachment group. Chi Square analysis demonstrated that attachment style was significantly (p0.001) different between tobacco users and non-users revealing that there is a possibility for prevention of smoking initiation through the development of a secure attachment style.

Ngaire Naffine’s Law and the Sexes was published in 1990.1 In this interview, conducted at the University of Adelaide Law School on 27 February 2015, Ngaire Naffine speaks about the process of conceptualising, researching and writing the book with Mary Heath. They go on to discuss the reception of Law and the Sexes at the time of its publication and to consider the contemporary context of feminist legal theory.

Irene Watson's powerful, resonant voice sings the Raw Law of the Tanganekald and Meintangk peoples throughout this brilliantly original book. Raw Law is, in a very profound sense, a book about law....

Contemporary higher education, including legal education, incorporates complexities that were not identified even a decade ago. Law programs first moved from traditional content-focussed programs toward incorporating critique and legal skills. Many are now working toward recognising inclusion and student wellbeing as integral to law graduates’ professional identities and skillsets. Yet the professional dispositions law teachers require to teach in these environments are ostensibly at odds with traditional lawyering identities founded upon an ideal of rationality that actively disengaged from affect. This article draws on our teaching experience and data drawn from the Smart Casual project, which designed self-directed professional development modules for sessional law teachers, to identify the limits of a traditional teaching skillset in the contemporary Australian tertiary law teaching context. We argue that contemporary legal education demands considerable emotional labour and we present sample contexts which highlight the challenges law teachers face in doing what is expected of them. The article makes explicit the emotional labour that has often been implicit or unrecognised in the role of legal academics in general, and in particular, in the role of sessional legal academics.

Significant, competing pressures for change have become constants in tertiary teaching. Many academics choose to change teaching and course design to better reflect pedagogical research and support learning. Some changes, however, are imposed by institutional policies responding to the wider higher education context. Whether change is chosen or imposed, managing it is made more difficult by increasing workloads and decreasing opportunities for collaborative decision-making and professional skills development. This chapter describes our experience of facilitating a community of practice with teachers of first year law students as a change management strategy. We established the community of practice with twin hopes. Firstly, we sought to support a research-based first year pedagogy, centred in an integrated approach to curriculum and student support. Secondly, we needed a pragmatic intervention to support implementation of a new curriculum and major changes in university policy with a new cohort of first year staff. A community of practice offered a promising model for achieving pedagogical goals through addressing teachers’ needs, rather than simply escalating demands on staff. We chose a community of practice approach believing it would allow teachers to strengthen collaborations, build skills and share best practices, all of which we believed were essential to creating an integrated first year experience that could result only from a team of first year teachers. This chapter discusses the initiation, development and achievements of our community of practice before turning to considerations of life cycle, leadership, resources and long term sustainability.

Existing research studies document significant challenges to bisexual and lesbian women's health, and suggest social connection may be protective. This study investigated how communities might contribute to bisexual and lesbian women's wellbeing. Interviews with 47 women suggest that community engagement could provide resources and social contact, enhancing women's confidence, self esteem and wellbeing. However, ensuring community support for wellbeing, requires actively choosing or creating an appropriate community, and rejecting those which are inappropriate. In some cases, it also demands negotiating or resisting community norms which conflict with women's wellbeing. This study also suggests bisexual and lesbian women often participate in different communities, that lesbian communities may be larger and composed of stronger ties than those of bisexual women, and the stronger social norms of lesbian communities may even threaten some lesbians' wellbeing. However, while bisexual women confronted fewer community norms, they may also have access to fewer community resources. (author abstract)

Despite a clear case for thinking skills in legal education, the approach to teaching these skills often appears to be implied in law curricula rather than identified explicitly. Thinking skills could be taught as part of reading law and legal problem solving. However, learning the full suite of thinking skills requires active teaching strategies which go beyond exposing students to the text of the law, and training them in its application by solving problem scenarios. The challenge for law teachers is to articulate how to learn legal thinking skills, and to do so at each level of the degree. This article outlines how the nexus between three component skills: critical legal thinking, reading law, and legal problem solving, can be put to work to provide a cohesive and scaffolded approach to the teaching of legal thinking. Although the approach in this article arises from the Smart Casual project, producing discipline-specific professional development resources directed at sessional teachers in law, we suggest that its application is relevant to all law teachers.

[Extract} The hypothesis that the university academic must have both a research and a teaching component to their work is under attack. At one stage it would have been said that every academic is by definition a researcher – that a research component is fundamental to the ethos of a tertiary institution and, specifically, the development of the teaching criteria for assessment and the setting of levels within that assessment. After all, how could one be comfortable that the grade for a particular piece of work was set at the appropriate level unless the assessor was knowledgeable in the research area? How could a marker confidently conclude that a student has applied the law correctly to a problem based scenario if they were not an active researcher in the relevant area of law? Universities were not to be seen as a college of teaching experts, but as experts teaching and disseminating the fruits of their research labour. It was the research component that allowed an institution to be its own benchmark and standard setter.

1.0 INTRODUCTION Anti-rape activism is replete with dilemmas. Let me begin with just one: conviction statistics for rape vividly summarise the lack of justice available to people who have experienced rape, and thus present a potential asset in achieving change. At the same time, however, they hold some real risks. They can focus attention on the legal system and leave other arenas in which change is needed untouched. They can send unwanted messages both to people who have experienced rape and to those who perpetrate it. And, as this paper demonstrates, the statistics themselves can become the focus of attention, when the original goal was to focus attention on improving the state of affairs that gave rise to low conviction statistics. This article reviews South Australian conviction statistics for rape and attempted rape from 1993-2003. It takes recent law reform processes in South Australia as a case study of the ways in which conviction rates can be mobilized as a tool by various participants in those processes. The blunt numbers presented in more detail below demonstrate that although the conviction rate from 1981-1991 was low and falling,1 from 1993-2003 the proportion of reports to police resulting in a finding of guilty as charged for rape or attempted rape fell still further. In 2003 only 1.5% of reports resulted in a finding of guilty as charged. What does this mean in concrete terms? Conservative estimates suggest that, at most, one in four rapes are reported to police.2 If they are correct, about 3144 rapes were committed in SA in 2003. If the national and international estimates that suggest 15% or less of rapes are reported3 are correct, approximately 5240 rapes were committed in this state in 2003. Yet, only 786 were reported to the police.4 In 2003, only 100 reached court, though a smaller number went to a full trial. Of these, 12 resulted in a finding of guilty as charged.5 Looking at these conviction figures makes me wonder whether the only realistic campaign which takes the criminal justice system as its focus would be a campaign to make rape illegal. Because there is little evidence that it is illegal except a few words tucked away in the Criminal Law Consolidation Act. In South Australia, rape is overwhelmingly subject to 'resolution without trial'.6 Indeed, twenty years after Catharine MacKinnon famously stated that rape 'is not prohibited; it is regulated'7, her words have become more, rather than less, obviously applicable in this state. In the face of such challenges, attempting to be realistic has begun to seem like an obstacle rather than an asset in ending rape. Eliminating sexual coercion is broadly seen as a wholly unrealistic goal, and perhaps that is part of the reason institutional responses to sexual violence remain manifestly inadequate. Only the realistic has been attempted, and these figures show that the scale of the problem demands much more than tinkering around the edges. However, the history of anti-rape activism shows a persistent return to law reform as a strategy. I have been, and continue to be, part of these efforts in tandem with other strategies. There are some profoundly good reasons to engage in rape law reform. They include the necessity to have society's ultimate sanctions for unacceptable and profoundly injurious conduct apply to sexual violence. They also include the urgent need to ensure access to justice for people who have experienced sexual violence. However, participation in law reform by its very nature compels the framing of demands that liberal law reform might be able to deliver. Having done that, those demands must be reduced again and again until they are polite and realistically attainable requests: requests that might find their way through the maze of impediments to law reform. Polite requests for recognizably legal outcomes, preferably those requiring no additional funding that have been shown to be effective 'elsewhere'. …

This article argues that the colonization of Australia was justified by denying that Indigenous peoples possessed recognizable societies, law, property rights or sovereignty. This denial, in turn, rests upon the supposition that Indigenous Australians were living in a ‘savage’, pre-civilized state: the state of nature of liberal theory. Such concepts, deeply embedded in western political thought, informed the view that Australia was a terra nullius or unowned land. Consequently, the contrast between ‘savagery’ and its counterpart, ‘civilization’ formed a critical element of colonial arguments that Australia could be colonized without either a war of ‘conquest’, or making a treaty. We argue here that more than 14 years after the rejection of terra nullius in Australian law, its legacy and the assumptions that underpinned it persist in the concepts more recent debates deploy as well as in the concept of terra nullius that some of these debates rehabilitate.

(2005). Encounters with the volcano: Strategies for emotional management in teaching the law of rape. The Law Teacher: Vol. 39, No. 2, pp. 129-149.

(2004). Growing Up the Space: A Conversation about the Future of Feminism. Australian Feminist Law Journal: Vol. 20, No. 1, pp. 95-111.

(1997). Catharine MacKinnon: Toward a Feminist Theory of The State? Australian Feminist Law Journal: Vol. 9, No. 1, pp. 45-63.

As with other professions, the declining rates of recruitment and retention of lawyers in rural and regional Australia is of significant concern. Whilst the causes of this vary between communities, common depictions of the rural and regional lawyer’s role indicate that employment as a lawyer in such areas is characterised by unique personal and professional challenges. Nonetheless, employment as a rural and regional lawyer also offers practitioners rewarding opportunities and lifestyle benefits. Research from other disciplines indicates that the challenges inherent in rural and regional professional practice may be alleviated, and benefits more easily harnessed, via place conscious discipline-specific curriculum that sensitises tertiary students to, and prepares them for, the rural and regional career context. Largely oriented towards substantive content to satisfy external accrediting bodies, undergraduate legal education does not typically acknowledge the ‘places’ in which graduates will practice as professionals. This article argues however that there is scope to incorporate place within legal education, and documents an innovative curriculum development project which embeds place consciousness to better prepare law students for employment in rural and regional legal practice. Drawing upon methods from other disciplines, the project team designed a curriculum package which aims to sensitise students to the rural and regional legal practice context, and equip them with the skills to overcome challenges and take advantage of the opportunities available in a rural or regional professional career.

This paper addresses certain aspects of the relationship between neoliberalism and university law schools. It arose out of a one-day workshop (hereafter ’the Workshop) xxx to mark the publication of Professor Margaret Thornton’s book, Privatising the Public University: The Case of Law. This book examines the ways in which privatization has impacted on law schools and legal education, particularly analyzing the ways in which changes to funding and the growth of neoliberal discourse have changed, on the one hand, students and their approaches to learning; and on the other, academics and their approaches to teaching and research.

Bisexual, queer and lesbian women experience higher rates of discrimination, trauma and abuse and are at higher risk for adverse health outcomes than heterosexual women in the same populations. This research investigated the strategies these women use to maximise the quality of health care they receive.Semi-structured interviews with 47 self identified bisexual, queer and lesbian women. Predominant themes were correlated with findings by other researchers.These women sought skilled practitioners who responded positively or neutrally to their sexuality. Some did not disclose their sexuality even where it seemed relevant, or preferred finding an accepting practitioner to ensuring continuity of care. Additional strategies for obtaining quality care included: 'coming out', selecting practitioners carefully, and educating practitioners about sexuality.Like those in other countries, Australian bisexual, queer, and lesbian women do not assume that health practitioners will accept their sexuality. They seek to avoid hostility by locating sympathetic practitioners. General practitioners can signal their willingness to provide quality services to these patients by relatively simple methods.

To describe bottled water use and beliefs and attitudes about water among parents of children from different racial/ethnic groups.Cross-sectional survey.Urban/suburban emergency department.Parents of children treated between September 2009 and March 2010.The respondents completed a questionnaire in English or Spanish, describing their use of bottled water and tap water for their children and rating their agreement with a series of belief statements about bottled water and tap water. Logistic regression was used to evaluate the association between bottled water use and beliefs and demographic characteristics with odds ratios (ORs).A total of 632 surveys were completed (35% white, 33% African American, and 32% Latino respondents). African American and Latino parents were more likely to give their children mostly bottled water; minority children were exclusively given bottled water 3 times more often than non-Latino white children (24% vs 8%, P .01). In logistic regression analysis, the following factors were independently associated with mostly bottled water use: belief that bottled water is safer (OR, 2.4), cleaner (OR, 2.0), better tasting (OR, 2.8), or more convenient (OR, 1.7). After other factors were adjusted for, race/ethnicity, household income, and prior residence outside the United States were not associated with bottled water use.Minority parents are more likely to exclusively give bottled water to their children. Disparities in bottled water use are driven largely by differences in beliefs and perceptions about water. Interventions to reduce bottled water use among minority families should be based on knowledge of the factors that are related to water use in these communities.