When Systems Collide: Improving Court Practices and Programs in Dual Jurisdiction Cases

The purpose of this article is to identify promising court‐based or court‐linked practices and programs that can effectively address the difficult challenges posed by dual jurisdiction cases. It is an initial effort to present what courts are currently doing or what courts can do to improve coordination of dual jurisdiction matters.     

Australia's National Integrity Systems: Introducing a New Blueprint

Australia is sometimes regarded as having well‐developed systems for protecting and promoting public integrity. Nevertheless the functioning of modern integrity systems is not particularly well understood, in Australia or internationally, and to be complacent about their state of health is obviously to court danger. In this introduction Frank Costigan, who as a royal commissioner in the 1980s pioneered new strategies for exposing institutional corruption and organized crime, introduces the results of the Australian National Integrity System Assessment — a collaborative Australian Research Council project seeking better ways of mapping and evaluating the institutions and processes dedicated nationally to ensuring integrity and accountability. The result is a new blueprint for key reforms and continual improvement in Australia's integrity systems over coming years.     

‘Respect for Law and Sausages’: How Parliament Made Section 31 of the Growth and Infrastructure Act 2013 on the Sale of Employment Rights

The Parliamentary debates on the clause which became section 31 of the Growth and Enterprise Act 2013 (allowing employees to agree to sign away employment rights for shares in the employing company) show that scrutiny by the House of Commons is very poor, and that scrutiny by the House of Lords is intense and very well‐informed. If the Government loses the argument on a Bill in the House of Lords, it will lose the vote. However, during Parliamentary ping‐pong (the back‐and‐forth process of amendment of a Bill between the two Houses) the Commons, and the Government, will normally get their way, however weak the policy proposal, provided that concessions on detail are made, unless the issue is regarded by the Lords as one of fundamental principle.     

Capital Changes

THE handover clock in Tian’anmen Square counting down the seconds till Hong Kong’s return to the motherland, smatterings of Cherokee jeeps, yellow miandi mini-buses and red Xiali taxis amid a sea of bicycles, and waistbands sporting bibiji are characteristics of the 1996 Beijing streetscape long since gone.     

The Rise of the Parliamentary Counsel

SUMMARY

In this article Sir George Engle has traced the early development of the use of official Parliamentary Counsel for the drafting of government legislation. The origins are traced to a series of individual legal experts employed informally by government in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries until the formal appointment of a Parliamentary Counsel to the Treasury in 1769. Following that, other major departments engaged their own Counsel until Peel decided to rationalize the system in 1841 and J.E.D. Bethune was appointed Counsel for fourteen government departments. The work of Henry Thring in developing the principles of parliamentary drafting is discussed and then the appointment of Thring to the ‘Office of Parliamentary Counsel’ in 1869, with one assistant. The institution was made permanent in 1871. The work of Thring's two successors, Henry Jenkyns and Courtnay libert and the working practices they developed arc analysed. Finally the artide summarizes the principle achievements of the Parliamentary Counsel Office over its 126 years of activity.