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 Australia, blind people are able to access texts in braille and books on tape, but the demand for these media is decreasing. Blind people today are increasingly reliant on texts in electronic form, and these are much less readily available in Australia. Electronic texts are more portable and less cumbersome than large braille volumes, and are much faster to navigate than audio recordings. However, in Australia it is difficult for blind people to get access to a wide range of electronic texts and there exists no scheme enabling such access. At the same time sighted people are using electronic text and other digital media at an ever-increasing rate. In order to approximate the same level of access as sighted people, blind people require access to accessible electronic versions of all published material.

The authors suggest that given the legal imperatives of Australia's domestic legislation, treaty obligations and social values, that there exists a moral imperative to create a scheme providing blind people with access to digital print media.

The Shakespeare Moot Court is a form of serious play that inspires participating legal and literary students and professors to think about interdisciplinary in a new way - by doing it. Members of the Court apply their analytical and argumentative skills to the task of creating the law of Shakespeare, tackling matters of public concern such as same-sex marriage, crimes against humanity, and freedom of religion. In the course, senior Law students and graduate students from English team up to argue cases in the “Court of Shakespeare” (where the sole Institutes, Codex, and Digest are comprised by the plays of William Shakespeare). The Court involves students (as counsel) and Shakespeareans and legal scholars (as judges) in a competitive and collaborative form of play whose object is to engage with Shakespeare’s plays in order to render judgments concerning particular contemporary legal problems. In the first part, this essay reflects on critical practice in Shakespeare studies and the argues that the legal model of the moot court offers this practice dimensions of accountability, corrigibility, and temporality which are essential to the future of the critical practice of literary studies. Above all the Shakespeare Moot Court provides a new and necessary way of restoring Shakespeare criticism, or some significant part of it, to the public realm. In the second part, the argument is reversed. The literary conceit of the Shakespeare Moot Project serves to dramatize that literature’s very different orientation offers to the world of law a vital reminder that the question of judgment is always imbricated in the character, experiences, and subjectivity of the judge. This perspective, which was indeed universally understood as integral to the exercise of judgment, whether literary or legal, in Shakespeare’s time, seems in many ways to have been forgotten or sidelined in most modern understandings of law. For the literary theorist, the “privatization” of literature from the late eighteenth century on has obscured its role in public discourse, as the first part argues. For the legal theorist, as the second part argues, the “publicization” of law from the late eighteenth century on has obscured its connection to personal responsibility. The two arguments together demonstrate that the Enlightenment’s project of defining and dividing disciplines - allocating the realm of public action to law and that of private feeling to literature - has come at the cost of the relevance of one and the humanity of the other.

This article examines the state of the law of procedural fairness and procedural error, demonstrating that inadequacy of process is now central to findings that decisions of the Executive are so lacking in quality as to manifest an error of law. The article argues that fairness of outcome and legitimacy of review need not be defined only in relation to the faultlessness of process.

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 article reviews the expansion of federal telecommunications interception powers, focusing on the watershed reforms enacted in 2006. The new statutory frameworks governing interception of "live" and "stored communications" are compared and contrasted, with a particular focus on their impact on human rights such as privacy and the fair trial. The article identifies significant regulatory loopholes and deficiencies in this new system, casting doubt on the usefulness of adopting a "balancing" model to guide either macro-level policy development or micro-level decision-making relating to individual warrants.

This article provides a review of the history, structure and form of the law of sedition, focusing on the new provisions inserted into the Criminal Code Act 1995 (Cth) in 2005 as part of a wider counter-terrorism package. A short historical review of sedition in Australia is followed by a critical analysis of the new offences, which explores the constitutional and human rights implications of these new offences. Critical attention is given to the process of law reform that seeks to 'balance' security and human rights, focusing on the recommendations of the Australian Law Reform Commission which emerged from the retrospective review of the 2005 reforms. Our conclusion is that the 'balanced' model endorsed by the Australian Law Reform Commission produces incoherence in relation to the definition of offences and 'good faith' defences. In particular, incoherence is produced by definitions of offences that are over-inclusive or under-inclusive depending on the rationale (security or human rights) which is accorded priority.

This article discusses some of the most common ways in which business decisions are affected by cognitive biases. It focuses on the individual level of decision making and discusses how biases are deeply entrenched in the way many decisions are made. It also discusses how flaws in decision making can escalate when executives are under pressure, over-confident or part of a group.

The article argues that we need to develop a better understanding of the effect of cognitive biases on executive decision making. Whilst research suggests that many aspects of our decision making processes operate outside of our conscious awareness, it is suggested that these flaws may be easier to monitor and control when we are aware of their potential impact on corporate decisions.

The recognition of the implied freedom of political communication has been the subject of much controversy. Although a unanimous Court in Lange v Australian Broadcasting Corporation identified the textual basis for the implication, there continues to be significant uncertainty as to the nature and scope of the freedom. This article seeks to provide an alternative constitutional foundation for protecting political communication, which focuses on the way in which representative government has been accommodated within the federal structure of government. In doing so, it attempts to provide a firmer constitutional foundation for the protection of political communication.