Category: Opinion
  • Chris Nyst, Opinion, Politics, Privacy

A Right To Know

Don’t you sometimes miss the good, old-fashioned Moral High Ground? As a post-war baby, the world I was born into seemed a brave and righteous one. Our fathers had just fought and died to free us all from fascism and oppression. The world had paid a terrible price, but it was all worth it.  In the end we won, and the Bad Guys lost.
  • Chris Nyst, Criminal Law, Opinion

The Means To The End

About ten years before the birth of Christ the great Roman poet Publius Ovidius Naso, in his collection of epistolary poems known as The Heroides, coined the Latin phrase Exitus acta probat, which translates roughly to the often-quoted mantra ‘The end justifies the means’. It is a sentiment celebrated by the Italian Renaissance writer Niccolo Machiavelli in the 1500’s and enthusiastically embraced by a long list of authoritarian dictators throughout history. Thankfully, it has no place in the criminal justice system of any modern western democracy.
  • Chris Nyst, Criminal Law, International, Opinion, Politics

Ten Guilty Witches

In February 1692, in a secluded village in the isolated British American colony of Massachusetts, 9-year-old Betty Parris and her 11-year-old cousin Abigail Williams, began to behave very strangely indeed. It seems they had recently taken to screaming, ranting and raving, throwing objects hither and thither, making weird noises, and generally behaving in a way the local reverend described as “beyond the power of epileptic fits or natural disease to effect.” When other young females in the same village started to exhibit similarly disturbing symptoms, the good folk of Salem quickly concluded there was witchcraft at work in their town, and decided it was time to take action.
  • Criminal Law, Jonathan Nyst, Opinion

Secret X Files

This week Sky News aired the explosive documentary “Lawyer X: The Untold Story”, recounting the sorry tale of the now-notorious double-dealings of former Melbourne Barrister, Nicola Gobbo.
  • Chris Nyst, Entertainment, Opinion

Richard Carter – A True Gentleman

I was very saddened to hear this week of the passing of Rick Carter, the great Australian actor and comedian, with whom I worked on Gettin’ Square, a film I wrote and co-produced in 2003. A veteran of scores of classic Aussie films, including Muriel's Wedding, Babe, Rabbit Proof Fence, The Great Gatsby and Mad Max: Fury Road, and a long list of successful television series, Rick was an icon of the Australian entertainment industry over four decades of work.
  • Chris Nyst, Criminal Law, International, Opinion

Mea Culpa

They say confession is good for the soul. That may be so, but sometimes it seems there's a whole lot of things it's not nearly so good for. Just ask Liam Neeson.
  • Chris Nyst, Criminal Law, Opinion

A Cure For The Common Scold

The wheels of Justice turn slowly, but grind exceedingly fine. One of the biggest movies of 1967 was Franco Zeffirelli’s rollicking cinematic rom-com treatment of William Shakespeare’s comedy Taming of the Shrew, written and first performed four centuries earlier in the late 1500’s. The 1967 movie of the same name starred Hollywood’s then hottest couple, the Brangelina of their day, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, as the strong-willed couple Katherina and Petruchio, who are pitched together in a head-long battle of the sexes.For those who need to brush up on their Shakespeare, the Shrew plot follows the efforts of embattled dad Baptista Minola to marry off his two daughters, Bianca and Katherina.
  • Criminal Law, Opinion

Entertainment -v- Evidence

The concept of an impartial jury is central to the operation of our criminal justice system. For hundreds of years we have put our faith in those twelve ordinarily citizens, unbiased and unswayed by extraneous and irrelevant considerations, to stand as the fail-safe system and last line of defence between citizen and state. But of course the key part of that concept is impartiality. For any accused person to have a fair trial, the jury that deliberates on their guilt or innocence must be entirely unbiased and undistracted by any influence beyond the evidence adduced in court.
  • Chris Nyst, Litigation, Opinion

Rat Racers

Remember the old joke about lawyers and rats? In case you don't, here's how it goes: “The National Institute of Health announced this week it would start using lawyers instead of rats to conduct its laboratory experiments. The American Bar Association has objected, but the NIH says there are three good reasons why lawyers are better than rats for laboratory work. Firstly, there's a lot more of them. Secondly, laboratory staff don't become so emotionally attached to them, and thirdly, there are some things even a rat won't do for reward."
  • Chris Nyst, International, Opinion, Politics

The Man In The Arena

When I first started doing trial work as a young lawyer I was constantly surprised and intrigued by the persistent inconsistency between different eyewitness accounts of the exact same incident. Particularly when dealing with a violent or otherwise shocking event, such as a car crash or a brutal street brawl, no two witnesses seemed to remember the same event in the same way. For a defence lawyer it was the welcome stuff of reasonable doubt, but I soon learned it was also just a fact of life. When people are confronted by emergent and traumatic circumstances, their brains can only take in so much detail, and the fact two witnesses remember one event in completely different ways doesn't necessarily mean either one is telling fibs. Quite the contrary.
  • Human Rights, Jonathan Nyst, Opinion, Politics

The Great Dissenter

“I am the result of a loving upbringing in a peaceful country, with wonderful parents and siblings, a very long-term relationship, stability, support – but a feeling that life isn't always just and that there is injustice for people and we should do something about it.”
  • Chris Nyst, Criminal Law, Opinion

Redemption Road

There is no more powerful human narrative than the story of redemption, the assurance that no matter what evil we have done we can atone, strive to be better and ultimately find forgiveness. Not everyone believes in true redemption. But, like the good preacher, a good lawyer has to believe we all can hope to one day be delivered from our sins.