Modern Law in Australia Essay

Case law is one area of the law that is constantly developing and changing in reaction to changing perceptions and further court rulings that may supersede previous case laws (Legal dictionary - case law, 2015). Stare Decisis is a common law doctrine based on practicing law by referencing former decisions or cases (Miller, 2014).

Currently, human rights in Australia are protected in different ways. Unlike most other similar liberal democracies, Australia has no Bill of Rights to protect human rights in one single document. Instead, some rights can be found in the Constitution, our common law and legislation which includes acts passed by the Commonwealth Parliament or State or Territory Parliaments.

Through the progression of history the need for the principles articulated in Engineers’ Case was both necessary and appropriate. Callinan J in Workchoices’ Case made

In addition, Case Law Reasoning was used to determine the outcome. Case Law Reasoning is when courts take prior cases, also known as precedents, and apply these cases to guide in the decision making processes. This application of taking prior cases to assist in the conclusion of current cases is known as stare decisis. Because case facts often vary, several cases are usually brought up to expand and make it possible to have a factual determination. In addition, several cases are brought up because moral ideas and the acceptance of such will change over time. Having

The rules of precedent themselves are judge made, except where a statute has intervened. Occasionally, judges have to decide on a case where there is

An offeror will have made an offer where it appears to a reasonable person in the position of the offeree that an offer was intended.

Your managing partner has handed you the Supreme Court of Queenslands’ decision in The Public Trustee of Queensland and Anor v Meyer and Ors [2010] QSC 291 and asked you to answer the following questions. You should assume you are answering questions for someone who has not read the case, so be sure to provide sufficient detail in your answers. You do not need to provide reference details for Part A of the assignment.

Australian laws have two forms, public and private law. Public law is an individual versus the Australian government, for example, criminal law, constitutional law and environmental law. It involves public bodies, public matters and is the concern of everybody in Australia. Private law involves disputes between private citizens or entities, for example, contract law, family law and probate laws.

The Oxford Learner’s Dictionary defines fairness to be ‘the quality of treating people equally or in a way that is reasonable’ and justice as ‘the quality of being fair or reasonable’ (Oald8.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com, 2014). Investigation of the characteristics of the Australian Legal System (ALS) including its adoption, structure and operational rules, reveal that for the most part the system is based on these two attributes. This inference is further evidenced by the legally binding operational framework assigned to the financial services industry and reflected in the codes of practice that also guide it.

Stare decisis “to let the decision stand” operates in a pyramid-type fashion and is the doctrine that judicial decisions stand as precedent for cases arising in the future. It is a fundamental policy of our law that, except in unusual circumstances, a court’s determination on a point of law will be followed by courts of the same or lower rank in later cases presenting the same legal issue, even though different parties are involved and any years have elapsed.

The doctrine of Judicial precedent applies the principles of stare decisis which ‘lets the decision stand’. ‘Whenever a new problem arises in law the final decision forms a rule to be followed in all similar cases, making the law more predictable’ making it easier for people to live within the law.

The lower courts are bound by the House of Lords so they have to apply

“Historically, [the common law] is made quite differently from the Continental code. The code precedes judgments; the common law follows them. The code articulates in chapters, sections, and paragraphs the rules in accordance with which judgments are given. The common law on the other hand is inarticulate until it is expressed in a judgment. Where the code governs, it is the judge 's duty to ascertain the law from the words which the code uses. Where the common law governs, the judge, in what is now the forgotten past, decided the case in accordance with morality and custom and later judges followed his decision. They did not do so by construing the words of his judgment. They looked for the reason which had made him decide the case the way he did, the ratio decidendi as it came to be called. Thus it was the principle of the case, not the words, which went into the common law. So historically the

According to Black’s Law Dictionary (1990), a precedent is an adjudged case or decision of a court which is regarded as an example or authority for a subsequent case or a latter question of law on identical or similar issues. However, this has not clearly explained how the precedent regime used in common law jurisdiction is different from one that a state from statute law jurisdiction may use. As Goodhart points out, the real differences in the two systems are the binding effect of decided cases (Doctrine of Precedent). It would be too complex to explain the whole rule of binding precedent here and, for the sake of the latter discussion, we only need to know one aspect: while precedent cases create no legal obligation for a civil-law judge to follow, a judge from common law countries is obligated to follow a precedent judgment and the legal reasoning in it made by a superior court or a court in the same level if a subsequence case contains identical facts and issues.

Nowadays every legal system wants to achieve justice. Different legal traditions in the world have given a different meaning of this concept by following one of the two legal systems: a civil law system and a common law system. The civil law system emerged from Roman law and throughout many centuries has been developed in continental Europe and often is called a “continental legal system”, achieving its prominence through development of aqui communitare in Europe. The common law system emerged in England during the Anglo-Saxon period and was developed by British colonies, reaching its peak in the United Kingdom and the United States of America.