For anyone in the Sydney area, on the off chance that you might be interested and free, I am giving the Forbes legal history lecture on Australian tort law on November 5 in the Bar Common Room (the basement of 174 Phillip Street) at 5.00pm. The rather too-grand synopsis is

"Federation and Beyond: What the History of Australian Tort Law Can Tell Us".

Whilst some work has been done on the development of private law in the colonial period, little study has been undertaken of the post-Federation period. As Bruce Kercher has noted, it has traditionally been assumed that Australian law simply followed English law. This lecture will evaluate the traditional view by considering three leading cases in Australian tort law from three different periods - Balmain New Ferry Co Ltd v Robertson (1906), Australian Knitting Mills Ltd v Grant (1933) and Hargrave v Goldman (1963). It reveals that Australian courts were confronted with novel legal issues that could not be resolved by mere reference to English authority. Moreover, an analysis of the historical context of the cases reveals peculiarly Australian contexts to these decisions and demonstrates the contribution that studies of the history of tort law can make to wider Australian history.'

Cheers


Mark Lunney
Associate Professor of Law
Adjunct Research Fellow, Australian Centre for Intellectual Property in Agriculture
School of Law
University of New England
Armidale, 2351
New South Wales
Australia

Telephone : (02) 6773 2713 (outside Australia + 61 2 6773 2713).


‘My concern is with the relationship of philosophy to life. The significance of this relationship should be brought home to the student while he is yet standing on the threshold. You think perhaps of philosophy as dwelling in the clouds. I hope you may see that she is able to descend to earth. You think that in stopping to pay court to her, when you should be hastening forward on your journey, you are loitering in bypaths and wasting precious hours. I hope that you may share my faith that you are on the highway to the goal. Here you will find the key for the unlocking of bolts and combinations that shall never be pried open by clumsier or grosser tools. You think that there is nothing practical in a theory concerned with ultimate conceptions. That is true perhaps while you are dong the journeyman’s work of your profession. You may find, in the end, when you pass to higher problems, that instead of its being true that the study of the ultimate is profitless, there is little profitable in the study of anything else.’
 
Benjamin Cardozo, The Growth of the Law (1924) p 23.