Gray on 'Sponsor Pressure to Discipline Employees Who Have Expressed Unwelcome Views and Reform of the Business Torts in Australia'

Professor Anthony Gray of the USQ School of Law and Justice has published an article titled 'Sponsor Pressure to Discipline Employees Who Have Expressed Unwelcome Views and Reform of the Business Torts in Australia'.  The article appears in Volume 47(5) of the Australian Business Law Review.  Here is the abstract: 

"This article focuses on a suggestion that the current litigation involving footballer Israel Folau may involve an action by him against sponsors of his employer, if it could be shown that there was some link between sponsor concerns about public comments made and Mr Folau’s eventual termination. The article cannot answer the question specifically about Mr Folau’s case, but the suggestion raises important questions about Australia’s current regime of business torts. The article considers two important questions in this regard. First, whether Australian business law should recognise a tort of unlawful, intentional interference with trade or business, and secondly, if it does, how that tort would sit with the existing business torts of inducing breach of contract, conspiracy and intimidation. The article suggests that Australian business law should adopt the tort of unlawful, intentional interference with trade or business, and that an Australian court should also take the opportunity to subsume existing business law torts within this new tort, to simplify the law in this regard."

Hemming on "In search of a model provision for rape in Australia"

Dr Andrew Hemming, a Senior Lecturer in Law at the USQ School of Law and Justice, has published an important new article.  'In search of a model provision for rape in Australia' appears in Volume 38(1) of the University of Tasmania Law Review and can be accessed through USQ e-Prints.  Here is the abstract:

"The purpose of this article is to set out a comprehensive model provision for the crime of rape (or the equivalent offence) that can be incorporated into all Australian criminal jurisdictions irrespective of whether the particular legislation can be broadly categorised as being a code or a statute. This is in part achieved by defining the specified fault elements, such as knowledge and recklessness, within the provision, thereby overcoming the lack of such definitions in the entire code or statute in some jurisdictions. Given that only the Australian Capital Territory and the Northern Territory have adopted Chapter 2 of the Criminal Code 1995 (Cth), which contains all the general principles of criminal responsibility that apply to any offence, uniform criminal law reform in Australia has stalled. One objective of this article is to show that it is possible to reform key criminal offences in a uniform manner. Apart from addressing the current inconsistencies in rape provisions in Australia, the proposed model provision is also designed to clarify the vexed question of whether the defendant reasonably believed the victim was consenting. In this way, it is hoped that some of the well-known difficulties in securing a conviction for rape — where it is often one person’s word versus another’s against a standard of proof of beyond reasonable doubt — may be reduced through the comprehensiveness and clarity of the statutory language employed in the model provision."