Ideology, law and teaching

As I am a university lecturer, I was interested to read about the Young Liberals’ campaign to “out” left-wing lecturers. That seems to miss the point to me: it’s a bit unpleasantly reminiscent of a McCarthyist witch hunt.

I have to say that in law school I had a variety of lecturers, from open Marxists to known advisers to the Liberal Party. I had no problem with that. One of my best friends at high school was a neo-Marxist, my other best friend was a Tory. They didn’t like one another much, but I liked them both a lot. I’m still friends with both.

The problem is not that a lecturer has a political leaning. The real problem arises in two situations:

1. When a lecturer is sarcastic and vicious to those who disagree with his or her point of view.
2. When a lecturer allows his or her particular view to skew what is taught away from the curriculum.

I once had a lecturer who savaged those who didn’t agree with the particular brand of ideology he followed. As it happened, he was very, very left wing, but that’s not the issue: I don’t care whether he was left wing or right wing. The issue is that he silenced and mocked those who disagreed with him. Certainly it had an effect on my own experience in that class. I said barely a thing during class, and I definitely did not enjoy the subject. A lecturer cannot help portraying things from his or her own viewpoint to an extent, but I think he or she should be open-minded to different ideas and viewpoints.

The other issue occurs when a lecturer allows his or her viewpoint to skew classes away from what is set down in the curriculum. This need not be a political point of view – it could also be a particular research bug-bear which interests the lecturer. Particularly with core law subjects, the object should be to give students the ability to deal with problems in practice. My own attitude is that I must focus on getting the law across and not indulge myself in personal enthusiasms too much. Of course my enthusiasm is part of what makes my teaching engaging to students, but not if I just concentrate on those topics which I like to the detriment of other topics. I actually suspect that my students find my own personal biases amusing and somewhat bizarre. (On the one hand I have a deep hatred of the notion of “fusion fallacy”, for example, and a dislike of the narrow-minded Sydney Equity Bar. On the other hand, I love restitution and resulting trusts. Yum, yum!)  When these things come into issue I always try to fairly present the opposing point of view, and I flag my own personal prejudices, with a rider that it is by no means necessary to agree with me to do well in the course, and indeed I welcome and enjoy good argument to the contrary. Of course, I do highlight ways in which I think current laws are unfair or could be reformed, but again, I say that students are welcome to disagree, and that they won’t be marked down for doing so. I also say that I don’t care what line they take, as long as it is well argued and justified. I suspect that scary lecturer who savaged people who disagreed with him has made me very, very conscious about never doing that to my students.

My friend’s brother told me that one of his university lecturers doesn’t teach to the curriculum at all, but rather speaks about things which interest her. As far as I’m concerned, that is appalling. Teaching is not a personal soapbox – she should make her own soapbox blog if that’s what she wants to do. That’s a private affair. Indeed, one of the reasons why I am anonymous on this blog is because I don’t want my students to know my political views and to feel constrained by them in some way.

So perhaps what is needed is not a McCarthyist witchhunt, but a clear policy that students come from diverse backgrounds and have diverse points of view which should be encouraged by teachers, whatever their own personal leanings. After all, part of the way in which we learn is by taking into account opposing views and criticisms, difficult and painful as that may be sometimes.

(I have to repeat that last sentence to myself lately: I suffered a particularly vicious review of my recent attempt to submit an article to a prestigious journal…waaaah! Well, I guess if you want to play with the big boys, you’ve got to learn to play rough – they are mostly boys too, by the way.)

Why, oh why? Juries and the reasons for their decisions

It’s easy to be an armchair judge or jury member. I must admit that I was surprised when I read that Thomas Towle was found not guilty of six counts of culpable driving causing death. Instead, the jurors found him guilty of dangerous driving causing death, which is a lesser offence carrying a lesser sentence.

In 2006, the car Towle was driving spun out of control and crashed into a group of teenagers walking home from a party, killing 6 of them and seriously injuring 4 others. After the accident, he fled the scene, leaving his four year old son and ten year old daughter in the car. The parents of the dead teenagers have been outraged and distressed by the lesser conviction, particularly after it emerged that Towle had prior driving offences about which the jury had not been told. Of course, the reports that Towle’s father blames the “sinful” teenagers rather than his son for the accident will distress the parents even further.

But I also know from my own days in practice that it’s very different sitting through an entire case than it is reading a newspaper report. Indeed, the Victorian Setencing Advisory Committee prepared a report on public perceptions of sentencing which established exactly that. In the executive summary to the report it is stated that:

• In the abstract, the public thinks that sentences are too lenient
• In the abstract, people tend to think about violent and repeat offenders when reporting that sentencing is too lenient
• People have very little accurate knowledge of crime and the criminal justice system
• The mass media is the primary source of information on crime and justice issues
• When people are given more information, their levels of punitiveness drop dramatically
• People with previous experiences of crime victimisation are no more punitive than the general community
• People with high levels of fear of crime are more likely to be punitive
• Despite apparent punitiveness, the public favours increasing the use of alternatives to imprisonment
• Despite apparent punitiveness, the public believes that the most effective way to control crime is via programs such as education and parental support, rather than via criminal justice interventions
• Despite apparent punitiveness, public sentencing preferences are actually very similar to those expressed by the judiciary or actually used by the courts
• Despite apparent punitiveness, the public favours rehabilitation over punishment as the primary purpose of sentencing for young offenders, first-time offenders and property offenders
• Despite apparent punitiveness, public support for imprisonment declines when the offender makes restorative gesture

{emphasis added}

The report is well worth reading in full if you have a moment. Essentially, the only criminal cases about which we are told in the media are the “juicy” and shocking ones, where the result is newsworthy and sensational. Of course, media outlets like to focus on outraged victims and/or their families in these cases. Further, we only know a small proportion of the facts that come before a judge and jury, and studies have shown that when people are given more facts, their views of an appropriate response change. So I’m wary of claims that sentencing is “too lenient”. In individual cases, mistakes happen, but it is not an across-the-board phenomenon.

Back to the Towle case. The four principal charges against Towle were:

• Six counts of culpable driving causing death;
• Four counts of negligently causing serious injury;
• Six counts of dangerous driving causing death;
• Four counts of dangerous driving causing serious injury.

There were other charges, but I won’t mention them here. The first two were the more serious charges, with culpable driving carrying a penalty of up to 20 years in gaol. The second two were the alternative lesser charges, with dangerous driving carrying a penalty of up to 5 years in gaol. In order to prove that Towle was guilty of culpable driving, the prosecution had to prove that Towle was “grossly” negligent, whereas for the lesser charge of dangerous driving, the prosecution merely had to prove that Towle was negligent. In judging whether Towle’s driving was grossly negligent, or merely negligent, the jury could not be swayed by the horrific consequences of the accident or Towle’s cowardly actions afterwards. The question was to what degree the driving up to the accident was negligent?

I can’t answer that question. I don’t know all the information which the jury received. It is clear that he was speeding, with his son sitting on his lap, but I don’t know what the expert evidence was.

We also don’t know what the sentence will be yet. Justice Cummins will consider that question on Monday. However, in that context, I thought I might look at another report by the Victorian Sentencing Advisory Committee, which provides a “snapshot” of sentences for culpable driving causing death. It was interesting to note that the most common sentence of imprisonment for the more serious offence of culpable driving was four years with a non-parole period of two years. The median principal imprisonment level was 5 years. So even if Towle had been convicted of the more serious offence, according to the law of averages, he may still have been facing a sentence of around 5 years. It will be interesting to see what the sentence is. I suspect it will be at the higher end for dangerous driving, but I can’t say for sure.

The other question which has been raised in the light of this case is whether juries should explain their verdicts. Dr Mirko Bagaric and Colin Lovitt QC presented opposing points of view in The Herald Sun today. Presently, juries are not allowed to explain their verdicts to the press or anyone else. This is in contrast to the US, where juries can give interviews to the press explaining why they decided as they did. Sometimes this creates an unpleasant media circus where jury members are hounded by the press.

I think I sit somewhere between Bagaric and Lovitt. I think it’s important for juries to give an idea of why they decided as they did to maintain public confidence in the criminal justice system. As I’ve noted above, the more facts people know about a decision, the more likely they are to find it acceptable. But I think it is really important that individual jury members not be interviewed or identified by the press, and they certainly should not be hounded. I would favour an agreed written statement of reasons produced by the jury, to accompany the handing down of a verdict. Of course, the problem with this is that it may lead to more appeals in criminal cases if a potential flaw is found in the jury’s reasoning. But then, as Bagaric says, isn’t it fairer that we redress flaws than leave them hidden? And I think it’s always better to know than to be left in the dark. It may be that the jury had perfectly explicable reasons for deciding as they did in this case, and I think they should be allowed to give a statement justifying their decision.

Rights or wrong?

When I was younger, I was very taken with the idea of a Charter of Rights for Australia. I simply couldn’t fathom the fact that Australia didn’t have certain rights in its Constitution. But now that I’m older, I’m not so sure that a Charter of Rights is the panacea for all ills in society. I know that human rights are malleable, and that one human right can conflict with another.

For a particularly thorny and controversial case, see The Queen v GJ [2005] NTCCA 20, a case involving an Aboriginal elder and a young Aboriginal girl aged 14 or 15. The girl had been “promised” to the elder when she was a baby, but did not want to marry him, but her grandmother sent her to his house. In the event, the elder was charged of offences including assault (with a boomerang) and sexual intercourse with a child under the age of 16. The trial judge sentenced the elder to one month imprisonment (with a suspended sentence) because he found that the elder was behaving in accordance with customary indigenous law. However, on appeal, this sentence was overturned. 

Human rights do not provide a clear answer to a case like this. On the one hand, the elder could be said to have a right to continue to practice his own culture in a society where he made up an ethnic minority. On the other hand, the girl could be said to have a right to be free of inhuman and degrading treatment, and to have her rights treated as equal to any other child, regardless of her race or religion, and not to suffer because of her status as a woman.

I’m thinking about these issues because the Charter of Human Rights and Responsibilities Act 2006 (Vic) comes into force in Victoria today. Do I believe in human rights? Of course I do. I think that there should be a certain amount of freedom of speech (whether I agree with what is said or not), and that there should be freedom of religion, and so forth. But I can see that in some circumstances it is not easy. Say there is a group who argue that a certain religious group controls society and that they should be banned from Australia. This is something to which I have a very deep seated revulsion on a personal level. Obviously there is a right on the part of the group to freedom of speech, but there is also a right of the people of that particular religion to be free from vilification and discrimination. How to balance it? I can never quite make up my mind.

Peter Faris QC has written a piece which is extremely critical of the Charter of Rights. He sees it as a gravy train for lawyers, with little real practical benefit for the people.

I am not quite sure that the scenario is quite as dire as Faris QC portrays it. I went to a site for Conservative Lawyers in the UK (a scary concept). There I found a paper by two barristers which outlined the benefits and detriments of the Human Rights Act 1998 (UK) in the United Kingdom. (I had to overcome a personal prejudice – a lifelong dislike of Tories arising from my schooling in England). I found it to be a fair paper. The lawyers made five provisional conclusions:

• There was more uncertainty in the outcome of litigation where public authorities were concerned, particularly concerning the liability of public authorities in tort.
• More time and expense is incurred in arguing Human Rights Act points than is probably justifiable, although this is likely to settle down.
• There has been some “refreshing” of the common law with arguable benefit in some areas although the common law was generally regarded as being sufficiently dynamic to bring about changes absent the Human Rights Act.
• There is greater freedom for judges to make new law in areas where the law is either uncertain or possibly antiquated. 
•  Some cases where claimants would have failed before the Human Rights Act can now succeed. What success means however is still somewhat uncertain. The actual remedies available under the HRA are still a matter for development.

At [50] of their paper, the barristers conclude:

The approach of the Courts to the Human Rights Act has not perhaps been as radical as some feared. But we do venture to suggest that the effect of the Human Rights Act has been considerable in terms of the way in which public authorities organise their affairs. Whilst much of the evidence is anecdotal and perceived, sometimes, through the possibly unreliable medium of the popular press, there nevertheless seems to us to be a significant body of evidence that in a number of areas public bodies fearful of human rights violations are being unnecessarily elaborate and defensive in their response. This is very much a mirror of what was covered by the all party parliamentary enquiry into the so-called Compensation Culture. There it was concluded that the perception of a compensation culture affected the way people behaved notwithstanding the fact that there was no real evidence of an increase in compensation claims.

I am not against human rights per se, but my fear is that incorporating human rights into legislation may actually mean that governmental bodies try to obfuscate their actions from a fear of potential legal action. I would not be as negative as Faris QC, and I can see some benefits in human rights legislation. However, I cannot help thinking of freedom of information legislation, which has led to governmental bodies trying to increase the amount of material which is “off-limits” and exceptional. The case of McKinnon last year (about which I wrote a post) is an example of the way in which FOI can be manipulated to hide information. Similiarly, I worry that the net effect will be an unsavory one: governmental institutions will attempt to circumlocute human rights rather than upholding them.

Like a wounded bull

Stephen Warne has drawn my attention to an interesting article in Justinian, a subscription only journal for lawyers. In the article, the author draws a comparison between pirate ships and law firms:

US economics professor Peter Leeson…recently wrote a paper on The Law and Economics of Pirate Organization.

Pirates created highly successful criminal organisations, and Leeson says that:

“Contrary to most people’s images of pirate crews, they were quite large. Based on figures from 37 pirate ships between 1716 and 1726, it appears the average crew had about 80 members … crews of 150-200 were not uncommon…

“Unlike the swash-buckling psychopaths of fiction, historical pirates displayed sophisticated organization and coordination… They successfully cooperated with hundreds of other rogues. Amidst ubiquitous potential for conflict, they rarely fought, stole from, or deceived one another.”

Leeson also observes that pirates considered theft aboard their ships especially heinous, and he quotes an observer who said, “great robbers as they are to all besides, [pirates] are precisely just among themselves”.

Modern law firms invite comparisons with these pirate organisations, with law firms appearing to have improved the business model.

…

Modern lawyer piracy is not constrained by the law either, but for different reasons.

Lawyer/pirates control the wording of the law. They make sure it can’t easily reach out to them.

On top of that they are in charge of decisions to prosecute. Better still, unlike ordinary pirates, lawyers CAN rely on the judicial institutions to help them.

The judiciary is full of “successful” former lawyer pirates, who find it difficult to criticise others for doing what they themselves used to do.

There is a lot of camaraderie and “collegiality” in the legal profession, but perhaps the best devices of the lot are “disciplinary tribunals” actually dominated by current or former lawyer pirates, which contain a smattering of “lay” people to support claims of independence from the profession.

When lawyers are caught committing lawyering crimes, they can be shunted off to friendly tribunals instead of the ordinary criminal courts.

Last month NSW lawyer Leon Nikolaidis was sentenced to two years jail for criminal fraud, having been found guilty by a jury in an ordinary criminal court.

Unusually, this jailing of a lawyer was not for a trust account defalcation. NSW Legal Services Commissioner Steve Mark…said it was one of the few occasions when a solicitor had been convicted of criminal fraud within a legal practice. He said:

“There is a perception that a lawyer acting in a professional capacity attracts conduct charges, but not criminal charges… Even serious misconduct issues almost never lead to criminal prosecutions.”

There is one big exception. As with those old time pirates, thieving off other lawyers is regarded as particularly heinous.

Theft by lawyers from trust accounts is a bit like thieving off other lawyers, since it frequently results in claims against fidelity funds which the other lawyers have to keep topped up from their own pockets.

This fits in precisely with a discussion Stephen and I were having in the comments section of a previous post, wherein we noted that the ethical breach which is seen as particularly heinous by the profession is the trust defalcation. Our theory was in part that such breaches are easy to prosecute, dealing with numbers rather than thorny questions of ethics, and the prophylactic nature of the fiduciary obligation ensures that any defalcation will be a clear breach. But this article provides another explanation for the prevalence of trust defalcations as an ethical breach: essentially, lawyers who defalcate from trust funds steal from other lawyers, and therefore are treated particularly harshly.

Whereas lawyers stealing from clients…well, who is to judge? Other lawyers.

Services are a hard thing to give a monetary value. And the situation gets particularly thorny when one represents a client, and the client loses. Strangely enough, the client doesn’t feel like paying the bill any more, even though the lawyer may have done the best possible job in the circumstances.

I think a lot of the problems with billing arise from six minute billable units, which were the subject of my second post on this blog, so obviously they’ve been a bugbear of mine for a while. I was trying to explain the concept to some non-lawyer acquaintances who were simply agog at the notion. “What, you charge for every six minutes you spend on a file? Doesn’t that rack up awfully quickly?” said the non-lawyers. Well, yes. And that’s the idea. But further to that, one’s promotion within a law firm depends on the number of billable units one racks up.

So six minute units provide an incentive to:

(a) be inefficient;

(b) be a workaholic and work insane hours to get ahead; and/or

(c) lie about how long something took you.

Unfortunately for me, both (a) and (c) are totally against my world-view. And once I had a family, I had no desire to keep on being a workaholic. So I quit being a solicitor.

I’m sure there are a lot of lawyers who are less scrupulous than I with regard to fudging the figures. They figure everyone does it, and if they just massage it up a little bit, who’s going to notice? The satirical book Hell has Harbour Views features lawyers who routinely bill 27 hours a day (even if they’ve stayed up all night, it has to be false, think about it). I couldn’t laugh too hard at this – too close to the bone.

The difficulty is in judging when a bill is too large. Little increases are hard to pick up. Of course, as I noted in my earlier post, the Legal Practice regime in Victoria seeks to ensure solicitors go into an immense deal of detail in their bills. And it requires solicitors to offer an effective invite on the face of the bill for the client to complain or sue. This doesn’t really fix the problem. A poor old client has to get involved in further litigation. Why not try to stop the incentives to overbill by abolishing six minute billable units?

Obviously, there’s a need for something to change. As I said in another very early post, I think legal services are beyond the range of many ordinary people. And this may lead to the high volume of litigants in person in the court system, who believe that they are better off running their own case. In some instances, they may be right: I’ve seen some terrible lawyers out there.

If the legal profession wants respect in the community, it has to look at legal ethics as more than just trust defalcation. Good legal ethics also means charging clients a fair price, and doing a good job. I believe that if we deemphasise billable hours, this would improve morale and efficiency in law firms, and take away the incentive to “fudge the figures”.

Any comments welcome.

Fair recompense

Have I spoken about the case of Roxborough v Rothmans of Pall Mall Australia Limited [2001] HCA 68 on this blog before? If not, I’m surprised, because it’s one of my bug-bears.

Put briefly, tobacco wholesalers collected excise tax to pay to the State government. This tax was forwarded from tobacco retailers, who in turn charged the general public extra on the price of tobacco products. The retailers had collected the tax from the consumers, and had forwarded the tax to the wholesalers, but the wholesalers had not yet purchased excise licences from the NSW government when the High Court declared that state excise taxes were unconstitutional. There was a whole heap of unconstitutional tax money up for grabs. So the retailers sued the wholesalers to get the tax back. And they succeeded.

Here we have a problem. Can you see it? The retailers are not the real losers in this situation. The real losers are the consumers, the every day people who paid extra for their cigarettes. So whether it was the wholesalers or the retailers who kept the tax, the winner would get a windfall.

How can we give a fair recompense to the members of the public who had been overcharged for the price of their cigarettes? It would be almost impossible to prove how much consumers had been overcharged in that time.

I have always been a fan of creating some kind of trust for the benefit of the consumers. But then, what would be for the benefit of tobacco consumers? Maybe some kind of trust to recompense consumers, their families and the general public for the medical costs that they will have to incur as a result of tobacco related diseases? That way, it would be for the benefit of all.

There’s no way as the law presently stands that a court could do that. However, both American and Canadian law have developed in a way that enables a court to administer the proceeds of a class action according to the cy pres doctrine. That is, the court might not be able to compensate each wronged consumer precisely, but they could administer the money for the benefit of the wronged consumer for a purpose that comes as close as possible to helping all.

Recently, the Victorian Law Reform Commission has been considering proposals to enact provisions allowing Victorian courts to do this in its First Exposure Draft on Civil Reforms (pages 42 – 47 for those interested). I note that they consider precisely the sort of mechanism I proposed above and believe that courts should have the power to make such an arrangement. I prefer putting money into a cy pres scheme rather than putting it into some kind of a Justice Fund (which is another proposal), but I agree with the VLRC that there should be a broad discretion on the part of judges to choose how they administer the money.

All these considerations returned to my mind again with the recent Federal Court ruling against cardboard box magnate Richard Pratt. Visy was found to have entered into a price-fixing arrangement with its main rival, Amcor, so that they could set the price at a higher level than would occur if genuine competition were present. Apparently companies who have purchased Visy and Amcor products have commenced a class action, and have been greatly heartened by Justice Heerey’s ruling.

But here again: who are the real losers in this scenario? It is the general public, to whom the puchasers of Visy and Amcor products would have passed on any extra costs to the consumer. As Graeme Samuels, head of the ACCC said, “It was a premeditated fraud on Australian consumers. Anyone in the past who has bought a block of chocolate or a piece of fruit packed in a box made by Visy or Amcor has probably been ripped off.”

This is where another of my favourite beasts, a profit-stripping remedy, could come in useful. I would like consumer groups to bring an action to strip Visy and Amcor of ill-gotten profits gained through price-fixing and then ask the court administer the funds in a cy pres scheme for the benefit of the public (eg, to help people who are struggling to afford food and basic necessities).

Kids with guns

No, this isn’t a reference to the song by Gorillaz. It’s a reference to a Tasmanian government report that has been leaked to the press. It apparently suggests allowing children between the ages of 12 and 16 years old to use guns if they live in remote farming areas.

I am a lifelong city-slicker who supports gun control. So my knee-jerk reaction is immediately to conclude: No way, Jose! Having said that, I haven’t read the report and seen why it argues that such a measure should be taken. Perhaps it concludes that children on remote farms use guns anyway, so it’s better to have a policy of “harm minimisation” rather than banning the use of guns altogether.

Which brings a funny question to mind. Making a gross generalisation, why do the “Left” and the “Right” have diametrically opposed and contradictory attitudes to drugs and guns? The Left generally favour deregulation of drug use and “harm minimisation” in relation to the use of drugs by children. The Right generally believe we should be tough on drugs.

On the other hand, the Right generally believe that we should deregulate gun use, and some of the American Right, at least, believe that children should be taught to use guns safely (“harm minimisation”). The Left generally believe that we should be tough on guns.

Now that I think about this, the inconsistency seems weird. Aren’t drugs and guns both dangerous? Any thoughts/comments welcome. What is the relevant distinction?

Legalising abortion

The Victorian government has decided that it is going to decriminalise abortion in this state, and clarify the legal position. I’m glad. I think it’s best to be totally clear about the exact situations in which abortion will be legal or illegal. Much better than leaving things in a legal and moral vacuum.

I do not think that abortion should be illegal, or perhaps I should say that I believe that it shoudld be legal in some circumstances. As far as I am concerned, there are clearly circumstances where a woman should be able to choose whether or not to keep a child: where the child is the product of a rape, for example, or where a child is likely to be severely disabled. And what if the mother is unwell or unable to cope with a child for some reason? But on the other hand, I am very wary of late term abortions unless there is a very good reason (for example, the child has a massive congenital defect).

The abortion issue is such a divisive one. I don’t feel that I can be quite comfortable with either extreme position. I think women should think carefully before having an abortion, and, as far as I’m aware, the vast majority of women do. I have had some friends who have taken this step, and I do not think these women made the choice lightly. I would never castigate them for taking that step, and I do not think it is my place to do so. Nor would I judge them if they had chosen to keep the child.

Would I have done the same in similar circumstances? I just don’t know. When I saw my daughter at the 12 week ultrasound, I was amazed at how perfect and developed she was already. My daughter is such a precious bundle of joy, but she has had the luck to be born into a stable family with parents who can look after her.

The other difficulty is that it takes two people to create a child, but only one person bears the child. So there are two people who have an interest in what happens to the child, but one person (the man) is able to walk away if he wants to, whereas the other person (the woman) will at least have to bear the child, even if she then gives it up for adoption. The burden of the child is disproportionately on the woman. I do get a bit frustrated with men jumping up and down about the issue and telling women what to do. Yes of course they have a right to an opinion on the issue, and of course the father of a child should be able to have a say in what happens to the child. But ultimately, the man isn’t the one who has to cope with the child when it arrives. If he wants, he can walk away the day after conception and never see the child again. This just isn’t possible for the woman. She is literally the one left holding the baby!

What I do object to is someone telling me that I cannot make certain choices because of what their faith says, when I do not share that faith. I’m perfectly happy for people to make choices for themselves on the basis of their own faith. I’m also perfectly happy to have a reasoned dialogue with someone whose moral perspective is informed by their faith. But I’m not just going to agree that a certain thing should be done on the basis of a faith that I do not share, without discussing the issue in a logical and calm manner. I think that the move to legalise abortion is a good thing; it will hopefully lead to some logical and calm decisions about what is right and wrong in this very difficult area of morality and law.

More on choosing judges

Women are represented in the law as judges, barristers, solicitors, attorneys-general, law makers and court administrators. They identify an issue quickly, focus on it and persuade rather than dictate. Mostly, women who work in the law are goal oriented. They readily identify their litigation goal, their judgment goal.Women provide perspective. They search out the resolutions.Women have finely honed organisational skills (hence they make excellent juniors and instructors in litigation, sometimes of itself a distinct disadvantage).

Women are adaptive and flexible. They have identified the open and closed areas of legal practice. Thus, women have remained in the traditional fields of family law, conveyancing and criminal prosecution but expanded into relatively new areas, taxation and revenue law, planning and environmental law, administrative law, human rights law and indigenous land rights law. In so doing they have avoided the more adversarial, combative zones of commercial law and common law.

Women bring to the law a strong sense of method. This is borne out in the judgment writing of women in the superior courts…

(Extract from speech by Marilyn Warren, current Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Victoria, on 15 May 2003 to Victorian Women Lawyers)

I’d like to explore my own ambivalence about the words of Chief Justice Warren above. Are women different to men? Do they bring different qualities to a role? Before I had male cousins, I would have said that women and men were the same, but I no longer believe this. In general, women and men do have different approaches to matters. That is not to say that either approach is better than the other. It is also not to say that all women are the same. Most people will have a mixture of “masculine” and “feminine” traits. For example, my husband will kill me for writing this, but I am better at reverse parking and spatial tasks than he is (typically thought to be a more masculine trait). Further I am far more adversarial than my husband. He does not like confrontation. I don’t like it either, but if I have to confront someone, I will. And there are women who are far more aggressive than any man, and far less caring. Think about someone like Maggie Thatcher – hardly a stereotypically “feminine” woman.

I guess I’m wary of gross generalisations, and the idea that women are somehow better than men. We aren’t better than men, sometimes we’re just different. But I do think that many women have a very valuable perspective to add to the judicial bench. With this in mind, I am considering the appointment of Justice Kiefel to the High Court of Australia.

Will Justice Kiefel bring a different perspective to the Court? I really hope so. I don’t care if it’s as a result of her gender or not. To me, the point for celebration is not that Her Honour is a woman, but that she shows some signs of having independent thought processes. The present High Court is so hidebound. I don’t know if this is some kind of pendulum effect – whether the Court is at pains to swing away from the perceived “activism” of the 80s and 90s. I think that this is mistaken. To try to keep the law static is as much activism as is attempting to change the law. It also has a political agenda behind it.

The whole point of being on the High Court is that the law is (within reason) what you say it is. You are not bound by precedent. A High Court should both explain what the law is and develop it if necessary. By contrast, recent judgments of the House of Lords in the last 10 years have been interesting and one gets the feeling that they actually have open minds. I find myself almost wishing that there was still an avenue of appeal to the Privy Council. {Zounds, can a republican like myself really be saying that? Shows how desperate times have become… Note for US readers: republican = anti-Queen-as-head-of-Australia in this context}

So, congratulations, Justice Kiefel. May you make a difference!

Property and the body

The thing I love about this blogging gig is coming across other interesting blogs and people. Can I recommend that you read this post over at Balneus by Dave Bath about property in body parts?

The EU generally prohibits sale for profit of body parts, and Dave queries if there should be an exception for the sale of items such as hair for profit. He makes the good point that real hair can be used for wigs for people suffering from alopecia or baldness for other medical reasons (eg, undergoing chemotherapy). I know that some ladies in India sell their hair to be used in hair extensions for Western women. Well, if it keeps the family fed and healthy, why not?

It’s an interesting question. Coincidentally, the other day someone sent me this crazy site where you can purportedly sell your DNA for profit. The idea makes me feel squeamish. No way anyone’s gettin’ near my DNA. It worries me that companies might seek to patent people’s DNA and use the patent to monopolise the pharmaceutical benefits which might be derived from it. Sound neurotic and far-fetched? Uh-uh. Have a look at the case down below and you’ll see why lawyers become such neurotic beasts – they see the worst behaviour from everyone. Anyway, for reasons I will discuss, the sale of DNA would not be legal in Victoria.

It should be noted that, generally speaking, neither the selling nor buying of human tissue is legal in Victoria: ss 38(1) and 39(1), Human Tissue Act 1982 (Vic). However, there is an exception in s 39(2) which provides that the Minister may give a permit to a person to buy human tissue for profit in certain circumstances. Tissue is defined to mean “an organ, or part, of a human body or a substance extracted from, or from a part of, the human body.” Therefore even the sale of human hair or fingernails would not be legal in this State, unless a Minister was prepared to licence someone to purchase hair. Sperm, ova and foetal tissue are not covered by the provisions dealing with donation of human tissue. These types of tissue are covered by the Infertility Treatment Act 1995 (Vic).

As I said in comments at Dave’s site, there’s a famous case called Moore v Regents of the University of California (1990) 793 P 2d 479 about property in body parts. Nasty people like me make poor students write essays about the case.

Moore was treated for leukaemia at the University of California Medical Centre. His spleen was removed as part of his medical treatment. His doctor and a researcher established a “cell line” with his spleen cells. Because the cells were cancerous, they produced a particular protein in large quantities for an indefinite period. They patented the cell line and made a profit. Moore sued them, saying that he had not consented to the use of his cells in this way.

One of Moore’s claims was that the spleen cells were his “property”, and that by using them without his consent, the University had committed the tort of conversion. They had been detached from him, and therefore were separate from him – did this mean they could be owned by him, as they were derived from him? A majority of the Supreme Court of California said that they were not Moore’s property. However, the University was found to have breached its fiduciary duty towards Moore (namely its duty not to profit at his expense without obtaining his consent).

I was trying to think why I find the sale of human hair less problematic than the sale of human DNA. My thought is that there is a distinction between cells which are living at the point of excision from the body (cell lines, ova, sperm, foetuses, blood etc) and cells which are dead at the point of excision from the body (hair, toenails etc).

Still, I think the only way you could safely allow for-profit use of hair and toenail clippings is to create an express exception for it: eg, “a prohibition on making the human body and its parts as such a source of financial gain, excepting toenail clippings and hair.” What are your thoughts?

P.S. Just realised that this is my first post with a category of “property”. I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to post about property law.

Religion, politics and therapeutic cloning

I’ve been invited to join the Blog Against Theocracy blogswarm. I thought I might write about something which happened a month ago, involving the Catholic Archbishop of Sydney, Cardinal George Pell.

In early June 2007, the NSW Parliament proposed to amend the Human Cloning and Other Practices Act 2003 to legalise therapeutic cloning.

“Therapeutic cloning” is shorthand for somatic cell nuclear transfer. Essentially, it involves removing the nucleus from an ovum, and replacing it with the nucleus of another somatic cell (ie, a normal non-reproductive cell). The cells form a blastocyst (a ball of cells and a very early stage embryo). The benefits which might derive from this technology include possibly producing organs and cells to replace damaged ones (so that organ transplants and the like are not necessary). The hope is that it may also help people such as diabetics (with damaged pancreatic cells) and quadriplegics (with damaged spinal nerve cells). It seems that there is a lot of controversy surrounding the benefits and detriments of this technology.

Archbishop Pell called upon Catholic Members of Parliament not to vote in favour of the Bill. But the controversy arose when he also said, “It is a serious moral matter and Catholic politicians who vote for this legislation must realise that their voting has consequences for their place in the life of the Church.” The Archbishop was suggesting that perhaps those politicians who voted for the Bill should be denied communion.

As this article by Paul Collins outlines, there was history behind this call. During the 2004 US Presidential elections, a minority of US Archbishops had called for communion to be denied to Catholic Democrats who supported abortion or same-sex marriage.

In the event, Archbishop Pell’s call came to naught. The bill was passed.

It seems to me that Archbishop Pell’s statement was foolish. Of course His Eminence is entitled to express his view on therapeutic cloning, and to suggest what response he thinks the scriptures demand. But, to my mind, he is not entitled to threaten elected Members of Parliament with religious sanctions if they refuse to vote in the way that he recommends. It is bullying.

There is not an easy answer to whether therapeutic cloning is an ethical according to Christian principles. It is impossible to say when life begins and when consciousness begins. Personally, I do not think a bundle of cells can be categorised as “life as we know it”, but I can see that the line is hard to draw. How big does the bundle of cells have to get before I would think that a foetus was living? And what of the fact that a small bundle of cells with no consciousness or pain could potentially alleviate the suffering of some living people with full consciousness, and suffering great pain and discomfort? It’s a difficult question. The important thing is that Members of Parliament be free to vote according to their consciences, not just taking into account religion, but also the interests of their constituents. In the end, Members did just that. Some devout Catholics voted for the Bill, some voted against. And this is how it should be.

Mixing religion and state in the way that Archbishop Pell did brings a risk that those who are not of a particular religion may feel alienated. In this present day and age, we live in societies which are multicultural and diverse. Members of Parliament are supposed to be representative of their constituents, who may be of many faiths and many backgrounds. Religion may be part of what leads a Member to vote in a particular way, but the interest of constituents should also be paramount. That is what democracy is about.

As someone who is not religious, I am comfortable with a person discussing the ethical implications of a particular piece of legislation in the light of his or her faith. I respect that. But I am not comfortable with someone voting in a particular way simply because a leader of his or her faith says that the member might be punished. In fact, I would go so far as to say that I resent such behaviour. Did I vote for the leader of that faith? No. I voted for the Member, and as such, I expect him or her to exercise independent judgment, rather than speak for another organisation with which I have no affiliation. I don’t care what the religion is.

If I were a Catholic, I probably would have voted for the Bill out of sheer bloody-mindedness…maybe there’s a reason why I am not religious…I have difficulty following orders. 😉
In any case, Archbishop Pell’s comments do not seem to be in line with paragraph 28(a) of Pope Benedict XVI’s 2006 Papal Encyclical, Deus Caritas Est (“God Is Love”). His Holiness has stated the following in relation to the separation of Church and State:

The just ordering of society and the State is a central responsibility of politics. As Augustine once said, a State which is not governed according to justice would be just a bunch of thieves: “Remota itaque iustitia quid sunt regna nisi magna latrocinia?”. Fundamental to Christianity is the distinction between what belongs to Caesar and what belongs to God (cf. Mt 22:21), in other words, the distinction between Church and State, or, as the Second Vatican Council puts it, the autonomy of the temporal sphere. The State may not impose religion, yet it must guarantee religious freedom and harmony between the followers of different religions. For her part, the Church, as the social expression of Christian faith, has a proper independence and is structured on the basis of her faith as a community which the State must recognize. The two spheres are distinct, yet always interrelated.

Justice is both the aim and the intrinsic criterion of all politics. Politics is more than a mere mechanism for defining the rules of public life: its origin and its goal are found in justice, which by its very nature has to do with ethics. The State must inevitably face the question of how justice can be achieved here and now. But this presupposes an even more radical question: what is justice? The problem is one of practical reason; but if reason is to be exercised properly, it must undergo constant purification, since it can never be completely free of the danger of a certain ethical blindness caused by the dazzling effect of power and special interests.

Here politics and faith meet. Faith by its specific nature is an encounter with the living God—an encounter opening up new horizons extending beyond the sphere of reason. But it is also a purifying force for reason itself. From God’s standpoint, faith liberates reason from its blind spots and therefore helps it to be ever more fully itself. Faith enables reason to do its work more effectively and to see its proper object more clearly. This is where Catholic social doctrine has its place: it has no intention of giving the Church power over the State. Even less is it an attempt to impose on those who do not share the faith ways of thinking and modes of conduct proper to faith. Its aim is simply to help purify reason and to contribute, here and now, to the acknowledgment and attainment of what is just.

The Church’s social teaching argues on the basis of reason and natural law, namely, on the basis of what is in accord with the nature of every human being. It recognizes that it is not the Church’s responsibility to make this teaching prevail in political life. Rather, the Church wishes to help form consciences in political life and to stimulate greater insight into the authentic requirements of justice as well as greater readiness to act accordingly, even when this might involve conflict with situations of personal interest. Building a just social and civil order, wherein each person receives what is his or her due, is an essential task which every generation must take up anew. As a political task, this cannot be the Church’s immediate responsibility. Yet, since it is also a most important human responsibility, the Church is duty-bound to offer, through the purification of reason and through ethical formation, her own specific contribution towards understanding the requirements of justice and achieving them politically.

The Church cannot and must not take upon herself the political battle to bring about the most just society possible. She cannot and must not replace the State. Yet at the same time she cannot and must not remain on the sidelines in the fight for justice. She has to play her part through rational argument and she has to reawaken the spiritual energy without which justice, which always demands sacrifice, cannot prevail and prosper. A just society must be the achievement of politics, not of the Church. Yet the promotion of justice through efforts to bring about openness of mind and will to the demands of the common good is something which concerns the Church deeply.

It seems to me that this provides a good balance. We should not cut religion out of public life entirely. It has important spiritual and ethical insights which we should consider when weighing up a particular course of action. But unelected religious figures should not try to force elected representatives to follow their direction. It acheives no good for anybody: it makes non-religious people feel alienated, it gives an impression that a particular Church or creed is trying to bully Parliament, and it undermines the very nature of representative democracy.