Editorials undefended against defamation suits?
Tuesday, October 8th, 2013Here’s a surprising thing about the Defamation Act 1992. It removes the right for editorials to argue honest opinion (what used to be called “fair comment”). You ought to be sceptical about that claim. It sounds absurd. Editorials are the very epitome of fair comment/honest opinion. They are written on the assumption that the defence […]
Defamation ruling not very appealing
Tuesday, October 8th, 2013Reading the Court of Appeal’s decision in Smith v Dooley [2013] NZCA 428, you get the feeling that the High Court blundered in all the ways it’s possible to blunder in a defamation case. Lang J couldn’t even correctly work out what the words meant. And even if he’d got that right, he couldn’t tell […]
No one-stop media regulator
Wednesday, October 2nd, 2013The good news, for the Law Commission: the government thinks the Commission’s report on media regulation – recommending the establishment of a one-stop media complaints body serving print, broadcast and online platforms – is “excellent”. The bad news: the government has rejected that recommendation. I summarised the Commission’s proposal in an earlier post. In short, […]
Sign up!
Wednesday, October 2nd, 2013Like many others, I’m worried that NZ is about to sign up to a Treaty (the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement) that looks like it will have wide-ranging implications for our own laws – our ability to regulate genetically modified products, intellectual property, tobacco and alcohol, the flow of capital, the environment, the purchase of medicines, and […]
Nipples of discontent
Tuesday, October 1st, 2013It seems the whole of NZ’s media are carrying stories of the “nipple ban”. The stories say the Commercial Approvals Bureau has denied the NZ Breast Cancer Foundation permission to run an ad about breast cancer because it features nudity. Reading through the storms of readers’ comments, I’m encouraged to find that most people think this is daffy. (Take a look at the Scottish […]
What took us so long?
Friday, September 27th, 2013Great news that NZ has decided to join up to the Open Government Partnership, an international effort to increase government transparency. It’s a bit odd that our PM made this announcement as a sort of a postscript to a press release about his chummy meeting with UK PM David Cameron – and essentially described our […]
My pick for best protest of the year
Wednesday, August 28th, 2013Take a bow Greenpeace. Somehow Formula One has forced YouTube to take down the video with a copyright claim. Not at all sure how that works: the film is by Greenpeace.
Vince Siemer and Supreme Court accuse each other of contempt
Wednesday, July 31st, 2013When Vince Siemer was charged with contempt for flagrantly breaching a court suppression order, he made a novel argument: he was upholding the rule of law. The suppression order was made by Winkelmann J in the famous proceedings against the Urewera 18 relating to their alleged para-military exercises in the bush. Winkelmann J ruled that […]
Has the Harrassment Act just swallowed the law of defamation?
Wednesday, July 31st, 2013In a landmark judgment, a court has ordered a blogger to indefinitely remove more than a hundred posts and comments attacking the reputation of a lawyer, and not to write about her again. The decision (Flannagan v Sperling DC Waitakere, 4 June 2013, Harvey DCJ, CIV 2012-090-986) may have opened up a cheap highway through […]
Read this, if you haven’t already
Tuesday, May 21st, 2013Andrew Geddis nails the government for another constitutional abuse.
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