The rigidity of the 2008 Constitution of the Republic of the Union of Myanmar is rightly notorious, as this rigidity was proven at least three times through failed attempts at reform. Despite these failed attempts, the military disputed the results of the election held in November 2020, and conflict ostensibly over that issue led to a military coup on 1 February 2021. This coup purported to have been undertaken constitutionally as an ‘emergency’ but was the object of popular rejection. In this article, we focus on the struggle over constitutionalism that had its origins in earlier attempts to achieve democracy. In our focus on the current nature and implication of ‘constitutional struggle’ in Myanmar, we make use of analysis based on factual data collected by the second author, located in Mandalay, one of the epicentres of struggle against the military and their actions following the coup. Our argument is that this ‘praetorian constitutionalism’ in Myanmar absent a pre-agreed pact between the military and the civilian defies the basic logic of democratic or liberal constitutionalism and hence is unconstitutional in both spirit and text. This explains how a constitution drafted in order to protect the position and privileges of the military was ultimately in effect rejected by that same military. The article will argue that the praetorian constitutionalism of Myanmar during 2010–21 contains a necessarily built-in struggle between the civilian and the soldier that remains unresolved.

The concept of ‘justiciability’ in Australian federal jurisprudence has been described by the High Court as a ‘slippery term of indeterminate reference’. With the High Court yet to comprehensively consider the concept of justiciability, Australia’s jurisprudence has failed to develop a coherent doctrine which is apt to govern the outer limits of judicial power under Chapter III of the Constitution. This article argues the transplantation of UK justiciability jurisprudence into Australia’s constitutional context, as well as doctrinal inconsistencies in UK case law, have resulted in applications of the doctrine which undermine key principles of federal judicial power. Drawing on existing case law, this article proposes a reconceptualisation of justiciability into three categories — constitutional competence, institutional capacity and institutional legitimacy — as a principled framework to be applied and developed by Australian jurists going forward.

This article demonstrates the pressing need to rethink the doctrine of separation of powers in Australia in light of the increasing influence of intergovernmental organisations such as the Financial Action Task Force (‘FATF’), which are shaping domestic lawmaking. The article documents the influence of the FATF on Australia’s anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing framework, showing how FATF ‘recommendations’ are in fact decrees that Australia and other nation states integrate into their domestic legal systems — even when the legislative branch of government does not support such actions. The article suggests that Australia should consider implementing a fourth arm of government — an integrity arm — to strengthen the nation against the influence of intergovernmental organisations.

‘Penalty privilege’ is sometimes referred to as ‘the right to silence’ or more correctly the privilege against self-exposure to civil penalty. It is a procedural rule that applies equally to trade unions and corporations in Australian federal courts. This article critically investigates this equality of this treatment, revealing its historical evolution and arguing that it results in unequal outcomes, relative to the social and historical roles of unions and corporations. But it also discovers distinct incoherence in the application of penalty privilege, along with a host of related legislative interventions that have sought to entrench the equal treatment of trade unions and corporations more broadly. Accordingly, this article proposes a range of reform, with a particular focus on the application of penalty privilege in the federal arena. A more coherent application of penalty privilege, it is proposed, is one that applies in proportion to the social power exercised by persons and entities before the Court.

The words ‘the people’ of the States and of the Commonwealth appear throughout the Constitution, yet they have received little judicial attention. It remains unclear who constitutes ‘the people’ and what rights or freedoms membership of ‘the people’ entails. This essay explores these uncertainties, suggesting that ‘the people’ have an implied constitutional freedom to enter and remain in Australia without licence from the executive. Recognition of such an implied constitutional freedom would have important implications in the COVID-19 era for the validity of travel bans and restrictions, which exclude citizens from entering Australia on public health grounds.

Defamatory publications may carry any number of related or distinct imputations. Complexities arise where a plaintiff selects one or more imputations for complaint, but ignores other imputations carried by the same publication. In England and Wales, the so-called Polly Peck principle permits defendants to plead and justify an imputation other than one complained of by the plaintiff but bearing a common sting with such an imputation. The Polly Peck principle has not been good law in Australia for more than 20 years. The statutory defence of contextual truth in Australia’s uniform defamation laws, however, permits a defendant to plead and justify imputations that are ‘in addition to’ those complained of by the plaintiff and affords a complete defence where, having regard to the substantial truth of those contextual imputations, the imputations complained of by the plaintiff do not further harm the reputation of the plaintiff. As enacted, the defence was infected with a serious drafting error. This article looks at the implications of the reformulation of the contextual truth defence effected by the recent amendments to Australia’s uniform defamation laws. It posits that those implications are considerably broader than have been recognised to date. It argues that the reformulated defence not only corrects the drafting error in the original defence of contextual truth but also resurrects the Polly Peck principle in Australia and substantially neuters 20 years of confused jurisprudence concerning the extent to which a defendant is or should be constrained by the imputations pleaded by the plaintiff.

Exclusion of evidence when its probative value is exceeded by its risk of creating unfair prejudice has long been a fundamental safeguard against unfair trials and wrongful convictions. In 2016, IMM v The Queen (IMM) curtailed that safeguard by holding that trial judges should assess probative value on the assumption that the evidence is reliable and credible. The IMM majority placed emphasis on the capacity of the evidence. In doing so, it provided a mysterious qualification: some evidence may lack probative value not because it is unreliable, but because it is ‘simply unconvincing’. The majority illustrated unconvincingness with the example of an unreliable eyewitness identification. Courts and legal scholars criticised the majority judgment for its harmful implications and for its apparent incoherence. From a review of almost 4 years of post-IMM jurisprudence and deeper exploration into one particular case, we find that ‘simply unconvincing’ has accentuated the confusion and inconsistency in Australian evidence jurisprudence.

Much of the core work of government is now done pursuant to contract with private sector bodies, primarily for efficiency reasons. While the phenomenon of contracting out of governmental functions has attracted increasing scholarly attention in terms of public law accountability, the use of commercial arbitration for the resolution of contractual disputes involving governments has until recently attracted scant attention. The law regulating commercial arbitration does not distinguish between arbitrations between private actors and arbitrations involving governments, treating all commercial disputes as wholly private in nature. By controlling government action, arbitrators contribute to governance but without the hallmarks of the judicial process such as impartiality, transparency, the possibility for third-party participation and judicial oversight. As such, the law does not take into account the public dimension of disputes under government contracts or the role of arbitrators as adjudicators of public law disputes. Nor do there appear to be any constitutional constraints on the use of arbitration in government contracts.

The ‘chilling effect’ of defamation law has driven legislative action narrowing this tort’s scope and operation. As substantial reforms come into effect across Australia, this article provides a detailed analysis of how defamation law in the United Kingdom has developed since similarly narrowing reforms took effect there almost a decade ago, and the implications this will have for Australia. Two important aspects of reform in both jurisdictions are the serious harm threshold and the public interest defence. Both are targeted at narrowing the tort and taming its ‘chilling effect’. Although both of these two changes have definitively narrowed the tort in the United Kingdom, neither of them has revolutionised this tort nor abolished its core purpose to protect reputation against false imputations. Given the consistency in legislative purpose and framing of the new provisions as between the two jurisdictions, Australian courts should, consistently with their English counterparts, exercise caution when interpreting the new threshold and the new defence, to ensure they do not tread too far from the deeper principles underpinning the tort, even in its narrower, tamer form.

The National Security Legislation Amendment (Espionage and Foreign Interference) Act 2018 (Cth) introduced the first offences for acts of foreign interference in Australian history. Inter alia, the laws target activities sponsored by a foreign principal which seek to influence Australia’s democratic processes using coercive, deceptive and covert conduct. The Act’s offences address coercive and deceptive conduct by foreign actors, which align with those behaviours which find contempt in international law. However, it is the Act’s targeting of ‘covert’ conduct which has drawn the widest criticism, and which was the subject of a High Court challenge in Zhang v Commissioner of Police [2021] HCA 16. Despite the High Court not being required to determine the validity of the foreign interference offences, there remain serious questions regarding the proportionality of the offences within the legislation which target covert behaviour which is not coercive or deceptive. Such benign covert behaviour is not condemned in international law, and its prohibition in Australia presents as an attempt by the government to remediate exploitable gaps in international law by controlling the interactions of its own citizenry with foreign actors. When the available alternatives to such measures are considered, this regulation appears excessive. Thus, a future challenge to Australia’s foreign interference laws may focus on the burden which the foreign interference offence’s ‘covert’ element places on the constitutionally entrenched implied freedom of political communication.

The High Court applies the ‘text and structure approach’ when deriving constitutional implications. This requires implications to be drawn from the ‘text’ and ‘structure’ of the document. A particular line of criticism has been made by some scholars that frames this approach as a falsehood. According to these scholars, judges claim to be drawing implications solely from the ‘text’ and ‘structure’ but are, in fact, employing ‘external’ sources when carrying out this task. I argue that this criticism is misguided. Judges are using ‘external’ sources to help illuminate the ideas conveyed by, or contained within, the ‘text’ and ‘structure’. This means that their use of ‘external’ sources is not necessarily a circumvention of the text and structure approach but an accompaniment to it. The relevant scholars’ critique seems to be rooted in flawed conceptualisations of the Constitution’s ‘text’ and ‘structure’ and their ideational content. This work examines the problems with the relevant scholars’ critique and offers what I consider to be a more accurate explanation of the operation (and shortcomings) of the text and structure approach.