The Educational Rights of Asylum Seeking Children: Observing Failure

This article is based on observations of the educational facilities provided for asylum seeking children detained on Christmas Island. The article concludes that these facilities fail to meet Australia’s international obligations and political pledges which aim to protect the right to education of asylum seeking children.

Illegal dumping and crime prevention: A case study of Ash Road, Liverpool Council

Illegal waste disposal is an increasingly significant and costly problem. This paper considers a specific hot-spot for illegal dumping in Sydney, Australia from criminological perspectives. We contribute to the developing criminological literature that considers environmental harms as a crime. This draws upon the symbolic aspect of criminal law, contributing to the notion of environmental harms as wrongs worthy of sanction, and facilitates analysis through the prism of criminological literature. We apply theories of crime prevention to the site and argue that these techniques of crime prevention would be cheaper and more effective long-term than current council responses of simply reacting to dumping after it has occurred.

Mabel Hannah’s Justice: a contextual re-reading of Donoghue v Stevenson

In Donoghue v Stevenson,1 the House of Lords established negligence as an independent tort and reformulated the responsibility owed by one person to another in civil society. The accident of Mabel Hannah finding a snail in her ginger beer became the occasion for the law to disrupt the (then) normal practices of manufacture specifically, and socioeconomic conditions more generally, by introducing attentiveness to vulnerability as a civil ethic. This essay looks back at the case and reads it in its cultural and material contexts—with the intention of illuminating Lord Atkin’s neighbour principle within its specific historical framework, and to look again at the justice Mabel Hannah received through the decision. This reading will examine the gap between law and social justice, and re-contextualise the potential of tort law to operate as a kind of civil ethics or system of moral value. In this reading I consider the inflections of the neighbour figure, reading the case’s Biblical ‘Golden Rule’ alongside the anti-ethics of Nietzsche and Freud. I also consider the ongoing paradox of the neighbour as a figure for the recognition of suffering.

Has the Genie Been Let out of the Bottle? Ethnic Profiling in the Netherlands

A range of political and social developments in the Netherlands suggest that ethnic profiling in political and social discourse is no longer seen as a taboo. Increasingly ethnic profiling is perceived as part of the solution to ‘the problem’ of terrorism, radicalisation, integration, violent crime, serious public nuisance or public safety. Although Dutch legislation and regulations do not explicitly prohibit ethnic or racial profiling, for law enforcement officials to use generalisations based on ethnicity, race, national origin or religion is at odds with national and international law. Nonetheless, there is a risk that police, security, immigration and customs officials exercise their general and special powers on the basis of generalisations or stereotypes to tackle pressing social needs.

The Police Logic of Balancing the Interests in Copyright Law

This article examines the use of the phrase ‘balancing the interests’ in political debate relating to copyright law. I argue that this phrase no longer leads to broad debate on the proper balance to be struck between private, public and social interests in copyright law. Rather, today the phrase has come to represent a type of police logic which reflects the private interests of copyright owners and users as they already exist. Drawing on the work of Jacques Rancière I suggest that this balance of private interests may be upset by a strategy of ‘subjectivisation’ which challenges the existing distribution of social bodies by making new subjects appear. I conclude that the recent cases of Telstra Corporation v Phone Directories Company Pty Ltd1 and IceTV Pty Ltd v Nine Network Australia Pty Ltd2 represent a surprising and effective use of this strategy by reintroducing the ‘artist’ and the ‘maker’ into copyright law in such a way as to upset and displace the prior claims of copyright owners and users.

Teachers and Social Networking Sites: Think Before You Post

Social networking sites are highly popular and have profoundly changed the way people, including educators, communicate and interact. For many teachers the use of Facebook and MySpace is seen as a valuable educational tool and an integral part of their private social interaction. However, the exponential growth in the use of social networking sites by students and teachers alike has presented new legal, ethical and professional challenges for teachers and school administrators. Teachers might argue that their social networking sites are personal websites but they are ultimately very public spaces that leave an electronic trail that can have serious, albeit unintended, consequences for teachers who breach professional codes of conduct and education laws. Teachers face the risk of censured speech, professional misconduct and possible dismissal for posting inappropriate information including comments and pictures on these websites. The purpose of this article is to examine the legal and professional risks for teachers using social networking sites and it offers suggestions that school administrators might incorporate in their policies with regard to teachers’ use of social networking sites. The first part of the article reviews relevant US cases and the second part focuses on the following legal issues – free speech, privacy and security of information, professional conduct, and the implications for teachers and school administrators in the US, Australia and New Zealand. Included in the second part are some practical recommendations for teachers and their lawyers as they develop policies addressing the use of social networking websites in the educational workplace.

Media Neutrality or Stakeholder Inequality? Why emerging technology requires a rethinking of the stakeholder balance in copyright law.

This paper considers a number of emerging technologies and how they challenge the underpinnings of copyright law in Australia. It draws upon the idea that copyright law must ‘balance’ the rights of stakeholders (creators of works, inventors of technology and users of works) in order to provide the most effective environment for the protection and use of works. This paper further suggests that existing copyright legislation can be divided into provisions that offer rights to creators of works (‘front end’ provisions), and other provisions that restrict the rights of users and inventors of technology (the ‘back end’ provisions). It analyses the use of ‘media neutral’ language in copyright legislation in both the front and back end provisions and argues that the creators of works have far broader rights and protections than those offered in the back end to users and inventors. Further, through an analysis of emerging technologies it is argued that this imbalance offers an environment that restricts the uptake of new technologies and fails to properly foster the protection of the rights of users of these new works and technologies.

Negligent Sexual Assault: Reform Of The Criminal Law And A Tort Alternative

Negligent Sexual Assault: Reform Of The Criminal Law And A Tort Alternative

Human Rights and Social Justice: the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and the quiet revolution in international law

On the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of the Human Rights (UDHR) the Commonwealth Attorney General announced a national public consultation concerning the need for better human rights protection in Australia and the viability of a federal human rights charter. Whether or not the anticipated Charter includes social, economic and cultural rights is directly relevant to questions of social justice in Australia. This paper argues that the legislative acknowledgment of civil and political rights alone will not adequately address the human rights problems that are experienced in Australia. The reluctance to include economic, social and cultural rights in human rights legislation stems from the historical construction of an artificial distinction between civil and political rights, and economic social and cultural rights. This distinction was articulated and embedded in law with the translation of the UDHR into binding international law. It has been accepted and replicated in judicial consideration of the application on human rights legislation at the domestic level. The distinction between the two forms of rights underpins a general ambivalence about the capacity of human rights legislation to deliver social justice and echoes a critical tradition in legal philosophy that cautions against the reification of law. Coming into force early in the 21st century, the Convention of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities illustrates the effort of the international community to recognize and eschew the burden of the false dichotomy between civil and political and economic, social and cultural rights. Acknowledging the indivisible, interdependent and indissociable nature of human rights in Australia is a crucial step toward achieving human rights based social justice.