Andrew Fraser

Many years ago, a number of lawyers lunching with an ACT judicial officer bemoaned their lot as a new Children’s Court Magistrate was rapidly filling the Bimberi Youth Justice Centre with their young clients. (more…)

The ACT Supreme Court was the scene of two uniquely powerful demonstrations of advocacy on the one evening last week. (more…)

Worst of Friends by Suzanne Tripp Jurmain is a simply wonderful book, aimed at “pre-schoolers and up”. (more…)

The ACT Bar Association has confronted Chief Justice (CJ) Lucy McCallum over her self-admitted controversial statements about juries in sexual-assault trials. (more…)

Reports of malfeasance involving staff at the Alexander Maconochie Centre, the ACT’s supposedly human-rights-compliant prison, are now too numerous and too frequent to lack substantial veracity. (more…)

The upper echelons of Canberra’s criminal bar are on a collision course with Chief Justice Lucy McCallum over the conduct of sexual-assault trials in the ACT. (more…)

The ACT Labor-Greens coalition is widely seen as the most permissive and truly liberal government in the country. (more…)

“It’s a bit silly in this day and age but that’s how it is.” (more…)

It was a particularly technical legal point. The colleague was an experienced trial advocate with a case in which he felt there was a slim plot of fertile ground on which he might be able to appeal. But he just couldn’t quite work out how all the pieces might come together. (more…)

The ACT Labor-led Government might lead the nation in many worthy ways and it might, too, you might think, especially six months out from an election, be vigilant to avoid what many might see as an embarrassing own goal. But no… (more…)

ACT Attorney-General Shane Rattenbury might get the feeling that the new Law Reform and Sentencing Advisory Council he established in November last year is channeling Freddie Mercury: they want it all, and they want it now. (more…)

Juries seem either to love forensic scientists or just be baffled by them (or by the spin put on their findings by cunning counsel). Some judicial officers have been somewhat slower to embrace them – with potentially disastrous consequences, not just in judge-alone trials, but when evidence is ruled inadmissible and does not go to the jury. (more…)

It is more than 20 years since Labor Leader Simon Crean addressed Australian troops leaving to fight in the Bush-Blair-Howard war on Iraq. (more…)

I met Rabbi Kurt Stone on a bus trip in Europe in 1985, when I was immediately struck by his journalistic pedigree – he covered the Patty Hearst arrests live on radio from underneath a car as bullets flew above. (more…)

The terms of reference for the ACT Law Reform and Sentence Advisory Council are Rolls Royce, but the resources – three public servants – are Mini Minor. While the council is well constructed and will certainly be well led, it needs more horsepower. (more…)

Of the proposition that he was the greatest there can be no doubt. (more…)

As one of the pipers for the Australian War Memorial, I get a unique view of the crowds around the Pool of Reflection during the daily ritual that is the Last Post Ceremony. (more…)

The ACT’s judiciary will henceforth be lacking a meticulous pillar of consistency, but the resignation of Magistrate Beth Campbell allows also pause for reflection on the exceptional criminal courts the Territory has grown across Campbell’s quarter-century on the bench and indeed across the 34 years since self-government. (more…)