News aggregator

Yay! Tony Shaw, Felix Geiringer and I have been granted leave by Supreme Court to argue that Valerie Morse should not have been convicted of offensive behaviour for burning a flag at an Anzac Day ceremony. Along the way, hopefully we’ll be able to sort out how the Bill of Rights applies to open-textured criminal offences like this one, and particularly when they’re applied to protesters.

Vince Siemer has reshaped the law of contempt in New Zealand. The Supreme Court has ruled 3-2 that the Bill of Rights right to a jury trial applies to those charged with contempt, since they face potential jail terms of more than 3 months. But since it’s unfeasible to give all contempt respondents jury trials, the maximum penalty for contempt of court is now 3 months. That’s on a par with seeking donations by false pretence or disorderly assembly.

So Vince is still off to jail, but for three months, not six.

In a recent speech Law Commission President Sir Geoffrey Palmer laid down a challenge: define “privacy”. He promised a chocolate fish for the best entry. His view is that privacy defies definition. I proved him wrong. This is the correct definition of privacy:

Privacy is what people believe they have lost when they complain about their privacy being infringed.

I am delighted to announce that I won the competition. Now that I have consumed the prize, I can safely confess that I thought this entry was better:

I have a definition of “Privacy” for you, unfortunately because of privacy laws I am unable to divulge it to you.

As you’ll see, many entrants made the mistake of making a serious attempt to define privacy, and most of them submitted definitions revolving around control of personal information. What this misses is privacy invasions that consist of invading private spaces or paying unwanted attention. On a serious level, I think my colleague Dr Nicole Moreham has come up with a pretty robust and workable definition of privacy as a state of desired inaccessibility. But happily for me, she didn’t enter.

Bob Jones won $104,000 in his defamation case against Chris Lee. I don’t know much about the case, but on this report it illustrates some good lessons: an apology in time can avert an expensive and risky court battle; both sides’ costs probably exceeded the damages award (though such actions are cheap compared with costs in the UK); and it doesn’t pay to take on Bob Jones, as Hugh Templeton also famously discovered.