Tag: Brisbane Lawyer
  • Nicola Ellis, Property, Wills and Estates

The Fine Detail

As anyone can tell you, the property market is going absolutely gangbusters right now. So much so that a bidder at an auction in Sydney’s south last Saturday accidently bid against herself just as she was about to be declared the new owner of the property for sale at the hotly-contested auction. The final price was $1.62 million, with her previous bid being $1.619 million. The underbidder’s last offer was $1.618 million.
  • Alex Somers, Privacy

The Social Dilemma

The latest Netflix documentary, The Social Dilemma, serves up a thought-provoking critique of the unethical and largely unregulated tactics employed by social media platforms, namely surveillance capitalism and data mining, in order to exploit users for commercial benefit. The doco’s director, Jeff Orlowski, seeks to draw a causal link between the rise of these tactics in the 2010’s and broader social, political and economic concerns such as mental health issues, the spread of misinformation/conspiracy theories, and election tampering.
  • Jonathan Nyst, Opinion

D’OH!!

Is it just me, or are we maybe making things just a little more complicated than they really need to be? In the context of litigation, lawyers sometimes need to access and disclose copies of their clients’ financial and other records held by various government bodies. That means getting the client’s written authority to access their records, and then getting in touch with the relevant government institution. That should be pretty simple, right?
  • Criminal Law, Jonathan Nyst

Youthful Exuberance

School’s out! So hold onto your hats, folks, it's on again. As thousands of school-leavers descend upon Surfers Paradise for the annual ritual of revelry that has become known as Schoolies Week, thousands more parents hold their collective breath in dread and anticipation. The institutional shackles have been broken and cast aside, leaving only the unbridled celebratory passion of youth.
  • Chris Nyst, Criminal Law

In Defence Of The Defence

This week the Queensland opposition launched a robust attack on a centuries-old criminal law defence. The 'mistake of fact’ defence was encoded into Queensland law in 1899 when our Criminal Code was first enacted, adopting a common-law notion dating back at least as far as pre-Norman England, that criminal liability requires some sort of actual subjective culpability, whether based on moral guilt or negligence. Section 24 of our Code provides that a person who does something under an honest and reasonable, but mistaken, belief as to a particular fact, they are not criminally responsible to any greater extent than if that belief was correct.
  • 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.
  • Chris Nyst, Commissions of Inquiry, Criminal Law, Politics

An Uncommon Commodity

Without doubt, self-preservation is the most powerful and compelling of all human instincts. The will to survive - physically, emotionally, financially – is acute and compelling, inextricably ingrained in our human condition.