Is Whale Oil a journalist?
Sunday, December 1st, 2013More specifically, is Cameron Slater entitled to the same privilege to protect sources that other journalists have? As the NZ Herald reports, the owner/operator/author of NZ’s most widely read blog is being sued for defamation. The plaintiff has formally asked him whether he knows the name of his source. (You might have thought that the […]
Privacy scholarship
Friday, November 1st, 2013My colleague at VUW’s law school, Dr Nicole Moreham, asked me to post this: A scholarship is available for a student wishing to complete an LLM by thesis on the law of privacy at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand. The thesis will be supervised by Dr Nicole Moreham (co-editor of Tugenhat & Christie: […]
Can Len Brown sue for invasion of privacy?
Thursday, October 17th, 2013It’s always a bit dangerous to speculate on the legal significance of facts when a story is still emerging and not all those facts have come out. And the tort of invasion of privacy is still itself emerging from the misty depths of New Zealand’s common law, so its outline is not entirely clear either. […]
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.
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