Category Archives: Law

Fifteen years ago, in an earlier incarnation (law student), I wrote a newspaper article and an academic journal article on illegal street racing. Last weekend, while going through old papers at my parents’ home, I came across the transcripts of … Continue reading →

My AFR oped today is on prison reform. You can’t put acknowledgements in an opinion piece, but the piece owes a substantial debt to Justin Wolfers, who first suggested the idea of smarter prison contracts about 7 years ago, when … Continue reading →

The ABS has a new survey out today on personal fraud (HT: Dan Andrews). The headline in tomorrow’s reporting will doubtless be the finding that 453,100 Australians lost on average $2,160 as a result of personal fraud. But what surprised me … Continue reading →

The NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics (BOCSAR) is running a conference in Sydney on 18-19 February 2009, and are calling for abstracts. Conference details here (submissions close 11 July). I’m giving a plenary talk, which I’m very excited about. The man … Continue reading →

News that a million-dollar drug trial has been aborted because the jurors were playing Sudoku makes Steven Landsburg’s proposed incentive system suddenly look rather attractive. Weighing evidence is a difficult job. It requires a lot of attention and a lot of energy. … Continue reading →

The SMH today reports on an exchange of letters between Reverend Richard Lane and High Court Justice Michael Kirby. The rector of St Stephen’s Church in Bellevue Hill, the Reverend Richard Lane, denounced the judge for calling himself a Christian Anglican … Continue reading →

From Jonah Rockoff and JJ Prescott comes news that publicly accessible registers of convicted sex offenders (now in place across the US, perhaps coming soon to an Australian state near you) do not unambiguously reduce crime. Do Sex Offender Registration … Continue reading →

According to a new paper by Jeff Miron and coauthors, not very much at all. They focus almost solely on time series variation (hence missing some of the more interesting local variation), but the results are provocative nonetheless.

From looking at the jail population, we know that blokes in most countries commit at least 4 out of 5 major crimes. But now it looks as though the same is also true in aggregate. More Men, More Crime: Evidence … Continue reading →

According to a report in today’s paper, a couple of major Australian booksellers are refusing to sell a new Tom Cruise biography that is critical of Scientology. Book retailer Dymocks says it will not sell the biography. “We take all … Continue reading →

I blogged last year about the fact that too few judicial associateships are publicly advertised. A reader helpfully emails to let me know that Western Australia’s Supreme Court judges are now looking for associates for next year. Details here. Meanwhile, … Continue reading →

To mark the 150th anniversary of Louis Brandeis’s birthday, Adam Cohen has  a neat oped in the NYT on the Brandeis brief. For Brandeis, raw data was always key. Oliver Wendell Holmes, his distinguished senior colleague, once complained that Brandeis … Continue reading →

Last week, Kim Weatherall made the point on her blog that the new copyright legislation would criminalise the recording of a live concert on your mobile phone. This week, the mainstream media catches up. (Given the depth of commentary on Kim’s blog … Continue reading →

The Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee is holding hearings on copyright law reform today. Among the worst ideas put before it is a submission from the Copyright Agency Limited (CAL), which argues things like: there shouldn’t be a satire exemption (you can almost … Continue reading →