Publications
This is a searchable catalogue of the College's most recent books, book chapters, journal articles and working papers. The ANU College of Law also publishes a Research Paper Series on SSRN.

Civil Procedure: Commentary and Materials 4th Edition Alternative Dispute Resolution
Author(s): Molly Townes O'Brien, Kath Hall
This chapter provides an overview of the theory and practice of Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR). It discusses the growing need for methods other than litigation to resolve disputes, and focuses upon the growth of mediation, and to a lesser extent arbitration, in Australia. Other methods of dispute resolution are also discussed.
In the context of mediation, the structure of the mediation process is outlined, and the nature of consensual dispute resolution is explained. Four of the key features of mediation, namely accessibility, voluntariness, confidentiality and facilitation are analysed. Other issues such as power imbalance, enforceability of agreements to mediate and evaluation of mediation are also discussed.
The process of arbitration is then introduced, and the requirements of the Commercial Arbitration Acts are outlined. Finally, court-annexed mediation and arbitration, and the role of the legal profession in ADR practice are discussed.
Research theme: Criminal Law, Human Rights Law and Policy, Law and Social Justice, Legal Education, Private Law, Regulatory Law and Policy

The Idea of the University and the Contemporary Legal Academy
Author(s): Margaret Thornton
In light of the contemporary moves to transform the Australian university by subjecting it to the values of the market, the traditional idea of the university is in jeopardy. Freedom to teach, the unity of teaching and research, and academic selfgovernance are key factors associated with this idea. With its primarily professional and vocational focus, law has tended to be somewhat more ambivalent than the humanities about the freedoms associated with teaching and the pursuit of knowledge. Nevertheless, a liberal legal education is an ideal to which law schools have aspired over the last two or three decades. This article argues that, after a brief flirtation with a more humanistic legal education, the market is causing a swing back to a technocratic and doctrinal approach. The article draws on key proponents of the 'idea of the university', namely, Newman, Humboldt and Jaspers to consider what light these theorists might shed on the dilemma posed by the market imperative. It is suggested that a disregard for the presuppositions of the market could be disastrous for the future of the university law school.
Research theme: Human Rights Law and Policy, Law and Gender, Legal Education

Fresh Perspectives on the 'War on Terror'
Author(s): Miriam Gani
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.
Centre: CIPL
Research theme:

International Aviation Emissions to 2025: Can Emissions Be Stabilised Without Restricting Demand?
Author(s): Andrew Macintosh
International aviation is growing rapidly, resulting in rising aviation greenhouse gas emissions. Concerns about the growth trajectory of the industry and emissions have led to calls for market measures such as emissions trading and carbon levies to be introduced to restrict demand and prompt innovation. This paper provides an overview of the science on aviation's contribution to climate change, analyses the emission intensity improvements that are necessary to offset rising international demand. The findings suggest international aviation carbon dioxide emissions will increase by more than 110 per cent between 2005 and 2025 (from 416 Mt to between 876 and 1013 Mt) and that it is unlikely emissions could be stabilised at levels consistent with risk averse climate targets without restricting demand.
Centre: CIPL
Research theme: Administrative Law, Environmental Law, Law, Governance and Development

Forensic Nanotechnology, Biosecurity and Medical Professionalism: Improving the Australian Health Care System's Response to Terrorist Bombings
Author(s):
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'.
Centre:
Research theme:

International Law as an Influence on the Development of the Common Law: Evans v. State of New South Wales
Author(s):
The Full Federal Court in Evans v. State of New South Wales [2008] FCAFC 130 (Evans) declared that the ‘causing annoyance’ limb of cl 7(1)(b) of the World Youth Day Regulation 2008 was invalid, but found that the ‘causing inconvenience’ limb of cl 7(1)(b) was not invalid. The judgment has three interesting aspects.
Firstly, the judgment, in line with recent High Court decisions, applied the ‘principle of legality’ as an objective reformulation of the presumption against the infringement of fundamental principles such as common law rights and freedoms.
Secondly, the judgment stated that ‘freedom of religious belief and expression’ was ‘another important freedom generally accepted in Australian society’, an apparent clear statement that the freedom of religious belief and expression was among the common law rights and freedoms to which the principle of legality applied.
Thirdly, the Evans decision was the first recognition of the common law freedom of religious belief and expression by an Australian court which supported the freedom by reference to international law. This seems to be the first application by an Australian Court of Justice Brennan’s statement in Mabo v Queensland No 2(1992) 175 CLR 1 at 42 ; (1992) 107 ALR 1, 29 that ‘international law is a legitimate and important influence on the development of the common law, especially when international law declares the existence of universal human rights’.
The Evans decision shows that a more open minded approach to the application of international law would enrich Australian jurisprudence.
Centre: CIPL
Research theme: International Law

University of Western Australia v Gray: An Academic Duty to Commercialise Research?
Author(s):
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.
Centre:
Research theme: Legal Education

Fresh Perspectives on the ‘War on Terror’
Author(s): Miriam Gani
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.
Centre: CIPL
Research theme: Human Rights Law and Policy

Law Reform and Legal Education: Uniting Separate Worlds
Author(s):
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.
Centre:
Research theme: Legal Education

International Aviation Emissions to 2025: Can Emissions Be Stabilised Without Restricting Demand?
Author(s): Andrew Macintosh
International aviation is growing rapidly, resulting in rising aviation greenhouse gas emissions. Concerns about the growth trajectory of the industry and emissions have led to calls for market measures such as emissions trading and carbon levies to be introduced to restrict demand and prompt innovation. This paper provides an overview of the science on aviation's contribution to climate change, analyses the emission intensity improvements that are necessary to offset rising international demand. The findings suggest international aviation carbon dioxide emissions will increase by more than 110 per cent between 2005 and 2025 (from 416 Mt to between 876 and 1013 Mt) and that it is unlikely emissions could be stabilised at levels consistent with risk averse climate targets without restricting demand.
Centre: CIPL
Research theme: Administrative Law, Environmental Law, Law, Governance and Development

Creating the Conditions for Cross-Cultural Sensitivity: An Australian Law Dean's Perspective
Author(s):
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.
Centre: CCL
Research theme: Constitutional Law and Theory

Law, History, and the Idea of the High Court
Author(s):
I want to bring a slightly different perspective to those you have heard to this point: a legal perspective, with special reference to the High Court.
Reading through the program, what really struck me was how so many of the issues of history and historiography manifest themselves in the High Court, whether through the way they shape the issues that arise for decision, or in relation to how we see the role and impact of the Court itself as one of our institutions of national government. Just think of these themes in your program: colonialism, federation, national unity, democracy, environmental history, military history, indigenous history, gender issues. I could tell you the story of the High Court (and I must say that I think of history essentially as stories) from any or all of these perspectives: how these issues assume legal form and are pronounced upon by the Court, and how the currents of history themselves sweep through the Court and affect our assessment of it as an institution.
Moreover, the High Court’s own decision-making processes raise all of the familiar questions of historiography: questions of evidence and proof, of fact selection, of interpretation of texts, and so on. Former High Court Chief Justice Sir Anthony Mason will touch on that in the next session – let me first go back a step and say a bit about the some of the differences between law and history.
This paper was presented at the Australian Government Summer School For Teachers Of Australian History Conference, Canberra, Australia, 14-23 January 2008.
Centre: CLAH
Research theme:

Australian Legal Procedures and the Protection of Secret Aboriginal Spiritual Beliefs: A Fundamental Conflict
Author(s): Ernst Willheim
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.
Centre: CIPL
Research theme: Indigenous Peoples and the Law

Integrated Research into the Nanoparticle-Protein Corona: A New Focus for Safe, Sustainable and Equitable Development of Nanomedicines
Author(s):
Much contemporary nanotoxicology, nanotherapeutic and nanoregulatory research has been characterized by a focus on investigating how delivery of engineered nanoparticles (ENPs) to cells is dictated primarily by components of the ENP surface. An alternative model, some implications of which are discussed here, begins with fundamental physiochemical research into the interaction of a dynamic nanoparticle-protein corona (NPC) with biological systems. The proposed new model also requires, however, that any such NPC physiochemical research approach should involve integration and targeted collaboration from the earliest stages with nanotoxicology, nanotherapeutical and nanoregulatory expertise. The justification for this integrated approach, we argue, relates not just to efficiency and promotion of innovation but to an acknowledgement that public-funded basic physiochemical research in particular should now be accepted to incorporate strong higher-order public goods elements from its inception, not merely after product development at the technology-transfer stage. Issues, such as university research cooperation, commercialization and intellectual property protection, safety and cost- effectiveness regulatory assessment, as well as technology transfer should not be viewed as second-tier considerations, even in a 'blue sky' NPC basic research agenda.
Centre: CIPL
Research theme:

University of Western Australia v Gray: An Academic Duty to Commercialise Research?
Author(s):
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.
Centre:
Research theme: Legal Education

Medical Professionals Convicted of Accessing Child Pornography - Presumptive Lifetime Prohibition on Paediatric Practice?
Author(s):
Health Care Complaints Commission v Wingate [2007] NSWCA 326 concerns an appeal from the New South Wales Medical Tribunal regarding its findings on professional misconduct outside the practice of medicine in relation to a doctor convicted of possessing child pornography. The latest in a number of cases on this issue in Australia, it highlights the complexity of such decisions before medical tribunals and boards, as well as the diversity of approaches taken. Considering both this case and the recent Medical Practitioners Board of Victoria case of Re Stephanopoulos [2006] MPBV 12, this article argues that Australian tribunals and medical boards may not yet have achieved the right balance here in terms of protecting public safety and the reputation of the profession as a whole. It makes the case for a position statement from Australian professional bodies to create a presumption of a lifetime prohibition on paediatric practice after a medical professional has been convicted of accessing child pornography.
Centre: CLAH
Research theme: Human Rights Law and Policy

Selim V Lele and the Civil (Industrial) Conscription Prohibition: Constitutional Protection Against Federal Legislation Controlling or Privatising Australian Public Hospitals
Author(s):
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.
Centre: CCL
Research theme: Constitutional Law and Theory

Religion, Ethics, Law and Human Rights in Obstetric Research
Author(s):
Religion plays an important role in the lives of many medical researchers. In many cases, it has provided the basic impetus for them to engage in medical training and practice. An important part of that training, however, is to learn how to mesh their personal religious views with the principles of medical ethics (as derived from the Hippocratic tradition, as well as modern institutional domestic and international guidelines); health law (derived from legislation and judicial decisions); and human rights (as derived from constitutions or United Nations treaties such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights).
The ethics, law and human rights of involving pregnant women and fetuses in research has been dominated by norms that try to achieve an uneasy and often improbable balance between: the protection of the vulnerable fetus; and the autonomy and privacy of the pregnant woman and her right to exclude interference with her body. In this protracted and often heated debate, viability (that is the period when the fetus is deemed to have reached a capacity for independent existence outside the womb) has formed a point of division.
Prior to viability, the rights of the woman have tended to dominate and after viability, the State has more interest in protecting the vulnerable fetus. This distinction is more than a matter of convenience. It reflects the fact that no superior court has accorded full legal personality to a fetus, chiefly because the fetus lacks the interests and capacities that are normally associated with human existence. Some religious groups hotly contest this conclusion and assert that the fetus should have an enforceable right to life from the moment of conception. This, however, has never occurred in any jurisdiction.
Centre: CLAH
Research theme:

Forensic Nanotechnology, Biosecurity and Medical Professionalism: Improving the Australian Health Care System's Response to Terrorist Bombings
Author(s):
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'.
Centre: CIPL
Research theme:

Sunscreen Safety: The Precautionary Principle, the Australian Therapeutic Goods Administration and Nanoparticles in Sunscreens
Author(s):
The ‘Precautionary Principle’ provides a somewhat ill-defined guide, often of uncertain normative status, for administrative decision makers exercising decision-making power in circumstances of potential risk to human health or the environment. This paper seeks to explore to what extent the precautionary principle should have been and was in fact utilized by the Australian Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) in its decision to approve the marketing of sunscreens containing titanium dioxide (TiO2) and zinc oxide (ZnO) in nanoparticulate form. In particular, this article assesses to what extent better application of that principle might have altered the TGA’s decision that TiO2 and ZnO ENPs in sunscreens do not require new safety testing, because they are functionally equivalent to their bulk counterparts.
Centre: CIPL
Research theme: