The idea that courts should routinely grant stays of proceedings in the event of trial delays is largely unique to Canada. There are ways to address trial delays without terminating prosecutions.
Michelle Carter after being found guilty of involuntary manslaughter.
AP/ Glenn C. Silva
A key argument in support of the jury system is that it is a valued form of citizen participation in democracies. But the system has led to human rights abuses in Ghana.
The Baltimore Police Department is found to have violated the civil rights of poor blacks. A historian explains why those findings are eerily similar to how the city treated blacks in the 1800s.
South Africa needs to build a mental infrastructure that will allow people to individually and collectively engage in a bold, courageous and trutfhul dialogue.
Smile: you’re on camera.
Maxim Tarasyugin/Shutterstock
The Birmingham Six, from left, top; Patrick Hill, Hugh Callaghan and John Walker. Bottom; Richard McIlkenny, Gerard Hunter and William Power.
PA/PA Archive/Press Association Images
The Birmingham Six were released after spending 17 years in prison for crimes they did not commit – there’s still work to do to stop it happening again.
Bringing the hammer down. How the legal system fails the world’s most vulnerable people.
Tori Rector
There is fresh political impetus behind a constitutional device to allow Britain to veto EU laws, but the enthusiasm ignores the powers that already exist and the dangers of legislation on the hoof.
AbaThembu King Buyelekhaya Dalindyebo is fighting a 12-year jail sentence for arson and other crimes.
Reuters/Sumaya Hisham
So much of modern life involves our digital devices – including crime. As the field of digital forensics gains prominence, practitioners need practical and ethical guidelines.
View from the hotel balcony?
NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center
The turbocharged capitalism of private space flight is strangely at odds with the brotherly, generous global consensus that built the legal framework for extra-terrestrial travel.
The standard of proof that applies in different types of judicial proceedings may result in quite different verdicts.
Shutterstock/Andrey Popov
After saying he was ‘deeply suspicious’, a judge cleared a man of child pornography offences. We need to understand the standard of proof to make sense of verdicts, including AFL rulings on doping.
With controversial headline “This brazen Islam” a French magazine in 2012 claimed Muslims were infiltrating hospitals, cafeterias, swimming pools, schools
Commentators in France and elsewhere have taken the recent terrorist attacks in Paris as an occasion to reflect more broadly about Muslims in France. Many read the attacks as a sign of French Muslims…
Should Australia’s High Court judges be representative of the community that their rulings affect? Should politics play a part?
AAP/Lukas Coch
Late last week, the federal government appointed Geoffrey Nettle, a Victorian Court of Appeal judge, to the High Court to replace retiring justice Susan Crennan. Nettle is an excellent lawyer and his appointment…