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At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in Australia, as governments urged citizens to limit their movements and socially isolate as a protective strategy, the home became a place layered with new meanings. Feminists have long challenged characterisations of the home as a sanctuary. Such characterisations and feminist claims against them took on new complexity and significance during the pandemic. This article investigates access to abortion care in South Australia under COVID-19 restrictions, as a case study of the contest over the safety of the home. It examines the pre-existing legislative requirements placed on those in need of abortion that, in the context of the pandemic and newly available access to telehealth medicine, both illuminated and increased the exceptional status of abortion as a form of healthcare and complicated the gendered meanings of safety and home. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an independent, impartial judiciary, self-management is the core of managing judicial performance. However, judicial officers work in a context which requires institutional organisation, management and support. They also operate within a network of formal and informal norms, processes, and practices that constitute an ethical infrastructure, seeking to promote good judging. This article first describes the current judicial work context, the changing demands on judicial officers, and the consequences for judicial performance. Following that is a consideration of the adequacy of the ethical infrastructure to support good judging and to manage or regulate judicial conduct [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In March 2020, when emergency powers legislation was invoked in South Australia to manage COVID-19, the South Australian Abortion Action Coalition (saaac) had been campaigning to decriminalise abortion since 2015. The group quickly realised that COVID-19 restrictions would amplify pre-existing difficulties for abortion providers and their patients and focused its efforts on persuading members of the government and the Chief Public Health Officer to use emergency powers to suspend aspects of abortion law to enable better and safer access to abortion services, specifically medical abortion via telehealth. This article offers an account of saaac's 2020 campaign and asks why the needs of abortion patients and their healthcare providers were sidelined at the height of the COVID-19 lockdown in SA in early 2020. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The important changes that have taken place in the Australian magistracy along three dimensions namely autonomy, credentialization and prestige/status are presented. It was observed that some magistrates were dissatisfied with their autonomy with relation to their workloads hence it can be said that the professionalization of magistrates has increased but can only be regarded as incomplete.

[Security of judicial tenure is essential for the independence and impartiality of Australia's courts. Although magistrates and their courts deal with over 90 per cent of all civil and criminal [...]