Recent High Court cases of note

Every knows about high profile ones like the IATA case (which basically allows contracting parties to define when they are or are not liable to each other and therefore avoid the parri passu rule in liquidation), but there have been a number of other High Court cases that have been veerrrrrry interesting.

Torts textbook writers will have to revise all their "standard of care" chapters after the overturning of Cook v Cook in Imbree v McNeilly [2008] HCA 40.

The Copyright Agency case ([2008] HCA 35) has held that the LPI has no implied licence to publish survey plans even though doing so is integral to the proper functioning of the Torrens title system. This is interesting on lots of levels, conveniently summarised by Kim Weatherall on lawfont.

The Osland v Secretary to the Dept of Justice [2008] HCA 37 decision was interesting personally to me. I would venture to say that anyone studying crim in Australia would have heard about Osland's earlier (failed) appeal to the High Court in Osland v R [1998] HCA 75, as it was one of the first cases which ran the "battered woman syndrome" defence (where a defence is run in a murder trial that even though the trigger event was not particularly significant or dangerous, the history of being battered meant that it was the last straw that triggered the battered woman's belief that she was so at risk of death or serious bodily harm that her actions were necessary to avoid that risk). Well, it appears that after she lost in the High Court, she appealed for an executive pardon, and that was also refused and she applied to obtain information and government documents on why the pardon was refused. The High Court agreed that it was necessary for the Court of Appeal to look at the documents and determine for themselves whether it was really necessary to withhold those documents from her on "public interest" grounds. So this is sort of a victory for Ms Osland, but it is a loooong stretch to go from here to getting away with murder obtaining a pardon.