Posts by Keir Leslie
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Er, Deborah, with all due respect, there's some that would say that making a speech that gets reported on Kiwiblog as laying the ground for a coup is not exactly keeping your head down.
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The claims that Cunliffe is a victim of tall-poppy syndrome etc remind me of similar claims about Larry Summers. And fundamentally, the same problem applies.
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It would be a criminal case. It is almost always (but not quite always) a bad idea for any defendant to give evidence.
When I say Banks I mean Banks’ lawyer, really, I guess. (Isn’t that a weird way to put it now I think of it? Yes.)
The standard in the UK in 1978 for a defendant to `know’ was apparently to ``know of the relevant circumstances or have no substantial doubt as to their existence’’, can’t be bothered checking if it has changed since or if it is different in NZ. Williams uses the phrase `virtually certain’ as a gloss for `no substantial doubt'.
The Electoral Act provides that a donation is anonymous if the candidate doesn’t know, and couldn’t in the circumstances be expected to reasonably know. [Waffle about objective and subjective tests in the law deleted — this isn’t an exam! Ed.]
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The reason Labour made that choice was that without UF and NZF, Labour didn't have a majority. Now you might want Labour to give up a term in power for ideological purity, but really that's daft, especially to Brash's National.
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From my understanding that isn’t actually what people say though, and further, if it is, dear lord, get over yourselves.
Also '02? The Greens spent most of that campaign attacking Helen Clark and Labour. It's hardly a surprise there was a degree of caution there.
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For the party of law and order, ACT are looking pretty bloody criminal.
I think that for all the `there's only a few seats in it' that just isn't true --- Labour were never going to lead a government no matter the mathematical possibilities.
Also, speaking of mathematical possibilities, what on earth do you mean, `how Labour treated the Greens in '05'? The Greens didn't have the numbers, NZ First and UF did. Sucks to be the Greens, but you can hardly hold that against Labour.
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Don't think that's true though --- the prospect of a labour-led gov't after that election was very little.
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Mind you, if Banks stands up in a court and says ``I sort-of knew but then I purposely confused myself so I didn't know'' he's going to look like such a prat.
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Erm. You know, I am really actually confused as to what coherent theory of law you could have which is (a) broadly positivist and (b) rejects the existence of judge-made law in common law systems. I mean, I guess it exists, as a kind of theoretical possibility, lurking at the far edges of the permutation table, but it would seem to me to be the equivalent of the weird cross-breedings of the animal world, a possibility, but one singularly unfitted to actual life.
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It is hardly a snide comment to note that you are not presenting a very coherent theory when, after all, you are not. You did say: ``whilst our judiciary is free and independent it also doesn’t make the laws’’ which is just not true if you are a legal positivist. (If you hold to some natural law theory, or to the old view that judges merely discover the law that already exists, you could say that. But you can’t say that as a positivist!)
New Zealand is a common law system, and there is a great bulk of law in New Zealand that is not in fact derived from any Parliament. The greater part of the law of torts, for instance, is common law. This is law that is made by judges.