Category: Seminars, interviews & commentary

Some 190 media lawyers from the US, UK, Australia, Asia and Europe, gathered for two days of intense discussion and debate at London’s historic Stationers’ Hall, as part of the Media Law Resource Centre’s annual conference. Topics ranged from privacy to protection of sources and the high price of the freedom of the press ... more

Journalists and artists overreacted to the government’s sedition laws, according to the Australian Law Reform Commission’s David Weisbrot. In fact, the legislation was a considerable improvement on the old version of sedition. Even so, the ALRC would like to see greater protections for freedom of expression ... more

New Defamation Act “overwhelmingly favourable” to defendants, but more contentious is the future of private lives. Thank heavens there’ll still be plenty of “interlocutory disturbances” ... more

Veteran Queensland lawyer Doug Spence adds his voice to the call to stop the adoption of NSW’s version of statutory qualified privilege in the proposed Uniform Defamation Act. That law would not have accomodated much of the reporting that lead to the Fitzgerald inquiry or the “Dr Death” commission ... more

David Levine QC reviews Deborah Lipstadt’s account of the defamation case brought against her and Penguin Books by the Holocaust denier David Irving. This is one of the great defamation trials of modern history, made all the memorable by the masterly destruction of the plaintiff ... more

Why are the states and territories persisting with dragging NSW’s useless version of statutory qualified privilege into the uniform Defamation Act? Peter Applegarth SC argues that the qualified privilege defence drafted by Sir Samuel Griffith in 1889 is a far more effective mechanism for media defendants and other participants in public affairs ... more

David Levine gives a wide ranging interview to the Gazette of Law & Journalism. After nine years running the NSW Supreme Court defamation list he has some fascinating insights into the way plaintiffs and media defendants play the game. He talks of his most enjoyable and most dificult cases and the natural “predisposition” of judges to lean towards plaintiffs who take on large media corporations. He thinks corporations should be able to sue and the dead shouldn’t. And he believes there’s something in the public figure defence as it has developed in the US ... more

Media up in arms about NSW law reform plan to require judges to determine whether images acquired “covertly” can be published ... more