Changes to the County Court Criminal Procedure Practice Note

These changes come in on Monday 21st January.The amended note (36 pages) can be found here. Even more helpfully, a Notice to Practitioners (kind of an EM for practice notes) has been made available here. Most changes are minor procedural tweaks. Perhaps the most significant change is the Criminal Registry's express prohibition on filings by …

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A call to arms

I'm on my way home from the Law Institute of Victoria meeting discussed here on Thursday. Properly described, it was an Extraordinary Meeting of the LIV's Criminal Law Section.Lawyers came from far and wide to express their concerns. The meeting tonight was Standing Room Only. Many asserted their staunchly-held belief VLA is moving in the …

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Westlaw AU

Recently my Legal Online subscription was 'migrated' over to Thomson Reuter's new Westlaw AU interface. (Not to be confused with Westlaw Australia, a case law tab found in Westlaw International, which is a clunky resource mostly useful for Canadian, EU, Hong Kong, US and UK cases). I delayed it for as long as possible, wanting …

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Where is the value in SACStat?

The Sentencing Advisory Council's new SACStat program (tweeted about by my learned colleague a few days ago) is interesting, colourful and fairly intuitive. Searches of dispositions in the Magistrates' Court are recent (2009 - 2011) and statistically significant (only offences for which at least 50 examples are available will return a result). They are an …

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