In Planck & Planck [2024] FedCFamC1F 341 Riethmuller J states ...  the applicant filed an application on 12 September 2023 seeking: A stay on proceedings ... until authority and jurisdiction has been established as per the following 12 points ...    (1) Provide proof of authority that every judge, registrar, magistrate and public servant employees are commonwealth public officers, as per section 3 definitions of the crimes act 1914 Commonwealth, and    (2) Provide proof of jurisdiction as per crimes act 1914, s4, application of common law of England ..read more

'Authentic assessment: from panacea to criticality' by Tim Fawns, Margaret Bearman, Phillip Dawson, Juuso Henrik Nieminen, Kevin Ashford-Rowe and Keith Willey in (2024) Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education comments   Authentic assessment contrasts with ‘traditional’ forms of assessment in ways that appear to be significant and, largely, positive. However, authentic assessment is often invested with superpowers, including the ability to: surmount academic integrity concerns (Sotiriadou et al. 2020); make assessment more inclusive (Nieminen 2024); and ensure relevancy to fut ..read more

The fascinating 'Care as a constitutional value' by Sandra Fredman in (2024) International Journal of Constitutional Law comments   The centrality of care to society is increasingly recognized as an issue of public concern. Although painfully brought into focus during the COVID-19 pandemic, the public importance of care was already receiving attention well before then. Important scholarly work by feminists, labor lawyers, feminist economists, and scholars of relational theory and care ethics has been augmented by developments in international policy and human rights law. In 2015, th ..read more

'The Rapid Adoption of Generative AI' (Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis Working Paper Series, 2024) by Alexander Bick, Adam Blandin and David J Deming comments  Generative Artificial intelligence (AI) has rapidly emerged as a potentially transformative workplace technology. The large language model (LLM) ChatGPT debuted in November 2022, and by March 2024 the most common generative AI tools had been accessed more than three billion times by hundreds of millions of users each month (Liu and Wang, 2024). Several recent studies have found that generative AI improves worker productivity (Bry ..read more

R v Kirsten (a pseudonym) [2024] NSWDC 401 offers an outstanding account of judicial courtesy and the difficulties of dealing with pseudolaw exponents.   The judgment states   The accused indicated that rather than the name set out in the indictment she would only answer to the name “Kirsten a living woman” or “Kirsten... not her legal fiction name”: Tcpt, 5 August 2024, pp 19 and 42. I indulged her.  At earlier call-overs she had advised the Court that she would not be legally represented. At trial she said she was not representing herself but “presenting on behalf ..read more

'Symbolic Decolonization and Postal Politics: Sovereignty, Secession and the Stamps of Pseudo-States in Sub-Saharan Africa, c.1960-1979' by Gary Baines in (2024) 2(26) Monde(s) 113-134 comments  Since its inception, the Universal Postal Union (UPU) has designated its members as “countries” and “territories”. Historically, stamp-issuing members have included non-self-governing entities such as colonies, protectorates, and mandates that were controlled by an imperial or metropolitan power [1]. Following decolonization, the UPU’s membership swelled with the admission of a slew of newly inde ..read more

In Secretary, Department of Health v Medtronic Australasia Pty Ltd [2024] FCA 1096 the Federal Court of Australia has ordered Medtronic Australasia Pty Ltd (Medtronic) to pay $22 million in penalties for unlawfully supplying 16,267 units of the Infuse Bone Graft Kit to 109 hospitals between 1 September 2015 and 31 January 2020.   The Court's judgment comes after the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) commenced proceedings against Medtronic in August 2021. The Court also ordered that Medtronic pay $1 million as a contribution to the TGA’s legal costs.   The penalty is th ..read more

'Governmental influence over rights consciousness: public perceptions of the COVID-19 lockdown' by Simon Halliday, Andrew Jones, Jed Meers and JoeTomlinson in (2024) Journal of Law and Society comments  Legal consciousness has long been a major focus of enquiry within socio-legal studies – sufficiently so, indeed, that it may be difficult to frame it as a coherent field of enquiry. Examination of how the scholarship has developed over time reveals various underlying theoretical convictions and eclectic methodological approaches. Nonetheless, it is fair to say that a decent amount of the ..read more

The FTC announces that is taking action against DoNotPay, a US company that claimed to offer an AI service that was “the world’s first robot lawyer,” but unsurprisingly  failed to live up to "its lofty claims that the service could substitute for the expertise of a human lawyer".   According to the FTC’s complaint, DoNotPay promised that its service would allow consumers to “sue for assault without a lawyer” and “generate perfectly valid legal documents in no time,” and that the company would “replace the $200-billion-dollar legal industry with artificial intelligence.” DoNotPa ..read more

The Office of the Victorian Information Commissioner report on OVIC's Investigation into the use of ChatGPT by a Child Protection worker comments  In December 2023, the Department of Families, Fairness and Housing (DFFH) reported a privacy incident to the Office of the Information Commissioner (OVIC), explaining that a Child Protection worker (CPW1) had used ChatGPT when drafting a Protection Application Report (PA Report). The report had been submitted to the Children’s Court for a case concerning a young child whose parents had been charged in relation to sexual offences.  PA re ..read more