On 20 September 2001, in an address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American people, President George W Bush declared a 'war on terror'. The concept of the 'war on terror' has proven to be both an attractive and a potent rhetorical device. It has been adopted and elaborated upon by political leaders around the world, particularly in the context of military action in Afghanistan and Iraq. But use of the rhetoric has not been confined to the military context. The 'war on terror' is a domestic one, also, and the phrase has been used to account for broad criminal legislation, sweeping agency powers and potential human rights abuses throughout much of the world. This collection seeks both to draw on and to engage critically with the metaphor of war in the context of terrorism. It brings together a group of experts from Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, France and Germany who write about terrorism from a variety of disciplinary perspectives including international law and international relations, public and constitutional law, criminal law and criminology, legal theory, and psychology and law.

This chapter explores how medical professionalism in forensic bioterrorist investigations may be influenced by the enhanced surveillance, detection and data storage capacities offered by nanotechnology. It draws on the author's experience treating patients injured in the 2002 Bali bombings.

It is now well accepted that health professionals involved in forensic investigations may experience conflict of interest problems with moral, ethical, legal and human rights dimensions. Physicians acquiring information, for example, about crimes from patients may have to breach ethical and legal obligations of confidentiality in disclosing that information to justice authorities. The professional obligations of physicians involved in forensic investigations extend to the collation of evidence and provision of testimony within an adversarial legal system. Many of these duties have the potential to create dilemmas for a physician's sense of professionalism, which is generally characterised by an emphasis on public service, rather than profit-earning, by an occupation with State-recognised special skill.

Physicians treating terrorist suspects or involved in investigating allegations of massacres, may be assisted in resolving any resultant conflict of interest dilemmas by reference not only to basic principles of medical ethics, but to relevant United Nations guidelines. International humanitarian law is another important source of professional norms by which physicians can calibrate legislation or other obligations to the state requiring their involvement in such areas. It is an aggregation of customary and treaty-based principles and rules concerned with the treatment of wounded, civilians and prisoners in war, and overlapping with many areas of medical ethics. Article 7 of the ICCPR, as well as prohibiting torture or cruel, unusual or degrading treatment or punishment also provides that 'no one shall be subjected without his free consent to medical or scientific experimentation'.

In an era of tightening university budgets and pressure to commercialise academic knowledge, many higher education institutions see the exploitation of new inventions and discoveries, through the use of patents, as an additional revenue stream. To that end, many such organisations have in place policies and by-laws which regulate “ownership” and disclosure of inventions created by employees. This can be seen as a continuation of an ongoing process of shifting universities from institutes of “pure research” to commercial operations, seeking to maximise financial gains from the efforts of their researchers. However, new opportunities present new risks. One of the last Federal Court decisions by the High Court of Australia’s new Chief Justice, Justice French, in University of Western Australia v Gray [2008] FCA 498 explores some of the challenges which Australian university administrators and policy developers will need to overcome if an appropriate balance between private interests and public good is to be maintained in this context.

If their movement into commercial patenting is to be reconciled with the time-honoured position of universities as centres of learning, support for public goods and open access research, then government intervention, through an expansion of the “fair use” provisions in the Copyright Act and Patents Act to include academic research, may need to be considered. At the very least, patenting should be seen against its historical background: as an authorised, but limited, monopoly privilege granted temporarily and primarily in the public interest, to encourage innovation and to assist in the dissemination of knowledge.

I begin with a confronting proposition. Law reform and legal education have traditionally been separate worlds, rarely in danger of collision or even constructive combination. This separation is not good for either law reform or legal education, or for the legal profession, the discipline of law, or the advancement of society. These two separate worlds can and should be brought together, so that legal education has a conscious and deliberate law reform ethos and focus.

I do not know how many Law Deans are able successfully to combine the demands of 'deaning' with a regular role in the classroom; I am not one of them. In my first year as a Dean, in the first full flush of optimism and naivety, I did continue to teach: half a compulsory course in Australian constitutional law, a whole elective course on the High Court of Australia, and one-to-one supervision of four honours theses. But it nearly killed me. And I am sure that neither the students nor the law school benefited much from my over-ambitious attempt to be all things to all people. So I resolved to focus on deaning, confining my classroom appearances to occasional celebrity guest spots or emergency rescues.

In thinking, therefore, about effective techniques for teaching about other cultures and legal systems, I want to take a peculiarly decanal perspective. At first sight, this might seem odd; if he does not teach, let alone teach comparative law, what would he know (I hear you say) about effective teaching techniques? Well, in this now familiar International Association of Law Schools (IALS) '3-5 page' format, I thought I would take the opportunity to try to articulate the kind of contribution that might be made to effective teaching about other cultures and legal systems through the leadership role of the Dean, especially in relation to creating the conditions in which this kind of teaching might flourish.

This paper was presented at the International Association of Law Schools, General Assembly and Academic Program, Montreal, Canada, 29-30 May 2008: Effective Techniques for Teaching about Other Cultures and Legal Systems.

The essays in this book explore the intersections between law and religion. When Australian law intersects with Aboriginal religion the outcome is a massive collision. This essay explores that collision, a collision between core legal values of the dominant legal system and core religious values of a small minority group, Aboriginal Australians. That collision, or conflict, arises because Aboriginal religions are fundamentally different from mainstream religions. That difference is legally significant. But the dominant legal system has failed to accommodate the difference. In this essay I contend that Australian law has failed to resolve a fundamental conflict between, on the one hand, basic common law values including openness and transparency in public administration, open administration of justice, a legal culture that gives special weight to the protection of private property interests and, on the other hand, Aboriginal religious values, in particular, the secret nature of much Aboriginal religious belief. I further contend that, because Australian law has failed adequately to recognize and to adapt to the secret nature of much Aboriginal religious belief, because common law values particularly principles directed at protection of private property interests prevail, laws enacted for the purpose of protecting Aboriginal religious beliefs have failed to achieve their purpose. The final part of the essay offers suggestions for reform, including mechanisms for protecting the confidentiality of secret spiritual beliefs.

In an era of tightening university budgets and pressure to commercialise academic knowledge, many higher education institutions see the exploitation of new inventions and discoveries, through the use of patents, as an additional revenue stream. To that end, many such organisations have in place policies and by-laws which regulate “ownership” and disclosure of inventions created by employees. This can be seen as a continuation of an ongoing process of shifting universities from institutes of “pure research” to commercial operations, seeking to maximise financial gains from the efforts of their researchers. However, new opportunities present new risks. One of the last Federal Court decisions by the High Court of Australia’s new Chief Justice, Justice French, in University of Western Australia v Gray [2008] FCA 498 explores some of the challenges which Australian university administrators and policy developers will need to overcome if an appropriate balance between private interests and public good is to be maintained in this context.

If their movement into commercial patenting is to be reconciled with the time-honoured position of universities as centres of learning, support for public goods and open access research, then government intervention, through an expansion of the “fair use” provisions in the Copyright Act and Patents Act to include academic research, may need to be considered. At the very least, patenting should be seen against its historical background: as an authorised, but limited, monopoly privilege granted temporarily and primarily in the public interest, to encourage innovation and to assist in the dissemination of knowledge.

Selim v Lele (2008) 167 FCR 61; [2008] FCAFC 13 was a decision of the Federal Court (later upheld on appeal to the Australian High Court) which interpreted s 51(xxiiiA) of the Australian Constitution. This section accords the federal government, among other things, power to make laws with respect to the provision of “medical and dental services (but not so as to authorise any form of civil conscription)”. The Federal Court decided that the phrase “civil conscription” was analogous to “industrial conscription”. In that sense the Federal Court held that the prohibition was designed to preserve the employment autonomy of Australian medical practitioners or dentists, preventing federal laws that required them, either expressly or by practical compulsion, to work for the federal government or any industrial employer nominated or permitted by the federal government.

The specific question in Selim v Lele was whether the imposition of standards and prohibition of “inappropriate practice” under the Health Insurance Act 1973 (Cth), ss 10, 20, 20A and Pt VAA, amounted to civil conscription. The court held they did not. The Federal Court also discussed in that context the sufficiency of “practical compulsion” in relation to the s 51(xxxiiiA) prohibition.

The constitutional prohibition on “any form” of civil conscription provides one of the few rights protections in the Australian Constitution and may have an important role to play in shaping the limits of health care system privatisation in Australia.

The civil conscription prohibition in s 51(xxiiiA) of the federal Constitution provides a guarantee that Australian medical and dental practitioners will retain the practical choice of being either independent business people or salaried servants of the community. In this sense the guarantee in s 51(xxiiiA) operates like the “just terms” guarantee in s 51(xxxi). Neither can be circumvented by attempts to base federal legislation nominally on other heads of power unless the constitutional expression of that latter power expressly exempts it from the operation of the guarantee.

This chapter explores how medical professionalism in forensic bioterrorist investigations may be influenced by the enhanced surveillance, detection and data storage capacities offered by nanotechnology. It draws on the author's experience treating patients injured in the 2002 Bali bombings.

It is now well accepted that health professionals involved in forensic investigations may experience conflict of interest problems with moral, ethical, legal and human rights dimensions. Physicians acquiring information, for example, about crimes from patients may have to breach ethical and legal obligations of confidentiality in disclosing that information to justice authorities. The professional obligations of physicians involved in forensic investigations extend to the collation of evidence and provision of testimony within an adversarial legal system. Many of these duties have the potential to create dilemmas for a physician's sense of professionalism, which is generally characterised by an emphasis on public service, rather than profit-earning, by an occupation with State-recognised special skill.

Physicians treating terrorist suspects or involved in investigating allegations of massacres, may be assisted in resolving any resultant conflict of interest dilemmas by reference not only to basic principles of medical ethics, but to relevant United Nations guidelines. International humanitarian law is another important source of professional norms by which physicians can calibrate legislation or other obligations to the state requiring their involvement in such areas. It is an aggregation of customary and treaty-based principles and rules concerned with the treatment of wounded, civilians and prisoners in war, and overlapping with many areas of medical ethics. Article 7 of the ICCPR, as well as prohibiting torture or cruel, unusual or degrading treatment or punishment also provides that 'no one shall be subjected without his free consent to medical or scientific experimentation'.