Over the last 18 months the legal profession has seen unprecedented growth in the operations of global law firms in Australia. Recent mergers between top-tier and leading Australian law firms demonstrate the importance of Asian markets and the shifts in economic power from the West to the East. For such firms there are clear market and competitive drivers for expansion into Australia including proximity to rapidly developing Asian economies and increased opportunity to expand the firm’s global brand. Yet understanding the role played by Australian law firms in these developments can be tricky. For some newly merged global firms, the Australian operations are central to the firm’s regional and global expansion, allowing the firm to draw upon the strong performance and reputational capital of the Australian offices. For other global firms their alliances with Australia firms provide a strategic foundation for their expansion into Asia. And for third group of firms Australia remains a destination in its own right, sitting within the firm’s overall global network of international offices.

The Law of the Sea and the Polar Regions: Interactions between Global and Regional Regimes analyzes the contemporary Law of the Sea and related areas of international law in Antarctica and the Arctic, with a particular focus upon the interaction of global and regional regimes. The global component of the international law of the sea - principally the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea - applies to the entire marine domain in both polar regions but explicitly requires regional implementation or acknowledges its usefulness. This volume  examines regional regimes for the Arctic and Antarctic on science, maritime security, fisheries and shipping by means of common research questions; thus enabling an overall synthesis and identification of trends, differences and similarities.

Dr. Curran discusses her research evaluation of Legal Aid ACT where she was asked to not only measure the quality of the legal services delivered but also to grapple with the vexed measurement of outcomes. In this paper Dr. Curran outlines briefly the approach to the evaluation, the lessons and some of the key findings around how to measure quality, outcomes and effectiveness of legal services delivery. 

This book displays the breadth and diversity of Australian administrative law. The different role played by courts, tribunals, ombudsmen and other review bodies is comprehensively covered. The criteria applied by those bodies in reviewing the legality and propriety of government administrative are examined in an integrated manner that best shows the options available to an aggrieved person. Public law concepts and theories that influence government decision making and administrative review are also covered.

Does humanity have a moral obligation to emphasise nanotechnology’s role in addressing the critical public health and environmental problems of our age? This well-crafted book explores this idea by analysing the prospects for a macroscience nanotechnology-for-environmental sustainability project in areas such as food, water and energy supply, medicine, healthcare, peace and security. Developing and applying an innovative science-based view of natural law underpinning a global social contract, it considers some of the key scientific and governance challenges such a global project may face.

This is a literature review for the Attorney-General’s Department. The brief was as follows.

This literature review will examine research, studies, reports, reviews and evaluation and other material both nationally and internationally around legal assistance service evaluations on the following:

'Successful Outcome'

Quality

Efficiency

Effectiveness

This Literature Review has examined a significant number of research, reports, evaluations, reviews, academic writing, studies and submissions. Some of the key lessons that these documents reveal are detailed in this Executive Summary. Some conclusions and their basis are summarized in the section entitled, 'Conclusion – An Overview of the Findings of this Literature Review'.

Some documents were provided directly to the researcher and to the Attorney-General’s Department by the Legal Assistance Sector but have not been included in this Literature Review as they were outside its scope. However, many are useful and are discussed in this Literature Review.

This Literature Review highlights that legal assistance work is not only complex but that it is also complicated. Forty-seven international studies and ninety-one national studies were considered in the course of the conduct of this literature review.

The selection criteria for determining the 'usefulness' of the reports/reviews/evaluations/ studies was as follows:

•Written in the last decade.

•The Document/Study examines outcome, quality, effectiveness and efficiency or a combination of these considerations.

•The study sets out a clear question to be answered and the methodological approach was relevant to being able to answer the question asked.

•The method for extracting information or data was effective and relevant to the information sought.

•The questions asked of participants in the instruments used were relevant.

•The data collected was sufficiently clear in illiciting the information sought.

•Given the complicated and complex nature and diversity of the legal services and the clients served, the methodology was likely to reveal the reasons behind the responses or approach that the service adopted in terms of the considerations listed above.

•A number of approaches were taken to verify, complement and unpack the reasons for the answer and included a blend of quantitative and qualitative data rather than reliance on quantitative data or one method.

•The approach taken is relevant and of assistance in the context of the NPA and the Attorney-General’s ‘Strategic Framework on Access to Justice in the Federal Civil Justice System’ , the COAG Reform Agenda and to social inclusion and Indigenous disadvantage.

Significant difficulties are identified in much of the domestic and international literature in the measurement of outcome/results, quality, efficiency and effectiveness.

The literature domestically and internationally, identifies the lack of a common language with which to articulate results, the lack of a framework in which to capture them and the difficulties in being able to measure and prove success. Where such results based measurement exists it will often need to be descriptive, subjective and there is a risk that cannot be avoided, of its being anecdotal and vague.

Each program must be first understood to be able to inform how to identify and define outcomes and measure these and ensure adaptive learning and adaptive management processes rather than these being fixed and remote from the realities of practice.

Any approach must be able to adapt and incorporate changing realities and demands on the services that are being examined.

There is no one way which can make it easy to achieve a successful outcome. Good practice informed by good training, cultural awareness, sensitivity, adaptability and flexibility are key factors in effectively reaching and targeting vulnerable and disadvantaged groups. Legal assistance services operate at different levels. Within a legal assistance service different objectives and intentions can sit behind each program. Therefore, they cannot be measured as a 'lump' without first understanding the very nature, diverse ways of engaging that are required to target different client groups, complexity, layers and imperative and funding requirements that drive each of the many parts.

This paper examines the legitimacy of public order offences in a contested intercultural space.

Other scholarship has exposed how public order offences are best understood, not as offences that are legitimate in themselves, but as a mechanism by which police can lawfully (but not necessarily 'fairly' or 'justly') increase their powers; this is to facilitate the 'maintenance of the peace' and to pre-empt crimes.

This paper instead considers more fundamental issues on which public order policing and laws are founded. It challenges common sense assumptions what is 'public', 'offensive' or 'disordered'. Even when considered within a Western cultural frame, these can be seen to be highly constructed and culturally contingent concepts. These concepts become much more unstable with they are transplanted to a liminal or frontier space, such as a remote Aboriginal community in the Northern Territory of Australia. In this highly contested space, the common sense appeal of these concepts is destabilised, and their legitimacy becomes tenuous, particularly for those who are the new objects of such ideas.

Since the commencement by the Australian Federal Government of a dramatic and controversial intervention into the Aboriginal affairs of the NT, police have been authorised to exercise unprecedented powers with respect to Aboriginal people and use an array of offences that have facilitated the suppression of resistance to Intervention and cultural assimilation, and to finally secure control of this space in which Aboriginal people have continued to exercise domain as Aboriginal people, despite Australia’s ongoing colonial project.

By reference to a case study in which an attempted Aboriginal dispute resolution process is reconstructed as a ‘riot’, this paper explores the impact of the attempted suppression of cultural practices using public order offences, and examines the early impacts, which include: increased political resistance to Intervention through deliberate flaunting of public order offences, lawlessness (where successful suppression of tribal practices results not in embrasure of mainstream values and practices but instead creates a vacuum where no social constraints operate), an exacerbation of the cycle of criminalisation and victimisation of Aboriginal people, and the possibility that tribal dispute resolution processes are withdrawing to spaces where Aboriginal people remain sovereign.

Re Edwards (2011) 4 ASTLR 392; [2011] NSWSC 478 adds to the small line of cases to have considered whether a woman can not only require medical staff to remove sperm from her dead male partner, but whether she is justified in terms of law and international human rights to use it to create children. In this case a Justice of the New South Wales Supreme Court framed the issue as “what right does a woman have to take sperm from the body of her deceased partner so that she may conceive a child?” He did so, despite the manifest ambiguity and difficulty in characterising the legislative rights in this case, without referring to substantive human rights obligations under international Conventions to which Australia is a ratifying party, particularly Art 10 of the United Nations International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and Art 23 of the United Nations International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Technological advances such as those creating the possibility of capturing a dead person’s sperm by electro-ejaculation and creating children by subjecting it to intracytoplasmic sperm injection in connection with in vitro fertilisation have altered the balance of individual and social interests in deciding who should be regarded as owning a dead man’s sperm and how that relates to basic common law rights of bodily inviolability without free consent. It is to be regretted that in jurisdictions lacking relevant constitutional human rights, or legislation requiring coherence with international human rights, judges do not avail themselves in cases of statutory ambiguity of interpretative insights to be gained from legally binding human rights treaties to which Australia is a party.

This is a review of Daniel Bodansky's "The Art and Craft of International Environmental Law." The piece considers Bodansky's idea of International Environmental Law as a 30% solution to international environmental problems in the context of: 1) norm proliferation and continuing environmental decline, and 2) the concept of sustainable development as an obstacle to environmental improvement.