Posts by Keir Leslie
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That is confused, I think. The burden of proof at trial is on the Crown. But afterwards, there isn’t really a burden of proof, because generally appeals are only on law, not fact. The fact that there has been created, at this late date, a mechanism for review of facts, with a prohibitive burden of proof, hardly means that we should accept that standard ourselves.
Or, rather, the courts need a decision. We don't, and we needn't adhere to mechanisms designed to produce decisions.
(By the way, while the `what counts as proven guilty is determined by the courts’ is a very attractive statement, the obvious follow on is that guilt is a purely formal term with no connection to any state of affairs except the judicial, a conclusion that we can hardly countenance.)
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Er, HORansome, the burden of proof is always on the Crown. You might say it is a bit of a thread in English law. So it doesn't matter if you aren't convinced he's innocent. That's not the goal here.
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13 years is a long time to spend in prison.
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Some run with the hope of winning, but not much chance. The Greens haven't run electorate candidates in a while, but I could see a serious Green candidate running in Wellington Central, aiming to win, even knowing they have only a 1 in 4 chance, or whatever. I think the current Green tendency to run fake candidates is likely to prove a bit of a fad, although I could be wrong.
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Two-way streets are seen as so clearly a Good Idea it doesn't make sense for them not to start from that point. Hardly a Gerry-ism, it's being pushed from the urban planning side of the council.
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Cuba St is the way it is because all the mainstream shopping migrated to the Lambton Quay area, and the resulting harder-to-let property attracted interesting shops and businesses. No council ever decided it was time to create an “artistic quarter”.
The council did plan a motorway through the area, and that kinda hammered rents down. So while they didn't decide to create an artistic quarter, they kinda did play a large part in it happening.
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In the sense that once bought, they stay bought.
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I don’t dispute anything you are saying, unless you are hoping to contend that legal services are in themselves an exportable product that we could invest more heavily in for big returns. The things you’re talking about are growing the real economy, the legal work is funded by the products of the other organizations.
What is the `real' economy? Seriously, when the courts solve a commercial dispute that produces real value. (Imagine if there was no law; the difference between that and what we have is real value.)
The idea of setting up the NZ legal system up as a massive export earner is clearly slightly fanciful, but then again, there's no reason we shouldn't look to find way to turn NZ's reputation as an honest independent and incorruptible nation into money. After all, it works for the Swiss.
(Like I say Ben, the UK legal industry has an export profile comparable to their universities, their pharma industry etc. That's pretty solid for what is a comparatively small industry.)
Essentially, I think trying to drive economic growth by targeting sectoral educational outcomes is ridiculous.
I agree! I think that the claims we don't have enough engineers or wevs, or that law is luring high quality undergrads away from sciences etc are basically unfounded.
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Actually, 3.2 billion pounds as an export figure is comparable with the British universities, and apparently pharma and British aerospace. (3.2 billion is the export figure; the contribution to GDP is way higher, but of course you shouldn't want that to be high, because you'd argue it is merely guard labour.)
You have a really weird division between real things and fake things which has no economic or factual foundation. (Suppose an accountant tells me not to make a thing no one wants, so instead I make a thing someone does. Has he contributed nothing real to the economy? Surely he has contributed more than I have, given he has saved us the existence of an unwanted thing and caused the existence of a wanted thing, whereas all I have caused is the wanted thing!)
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The assertion that you can't make money off legal services will come as some surprise to the London legal industry, which exports 3.2 billion pounds. Yes legal services are what you might call ancillary to the production of things, but these days the production of large numbers of physical objects is not a route to economic prosperity.
Of course, legal services is just one example. Film making is another area where NZ is top class, and I reckon that it's absurd that we don't encourage more of our best and brightest into screen writing. Too many of them will get lured away by the comparably massive financial subsidies to do engineering and the sciences. And if you think it is hard getting a job as a PhD scientist, consider the job prospects for a humanities PhD.