17 August 2018
James Lee Quoted in Australian Financial Review
The Australian Financial Review has quoted the work of King's academic James Lee in a recent article on decision-making in the High Court of Australia.
The Australian Financial Review has quoted the work of King's academic James Lee in a recent article on decision-making in the High Court of Australia. Click here to view the article.
The article, "High Court troika 'the most powerful bloc of judges in history'", examines patterns of judgment-giving.
Lee's project involved various papers on comparative judging in final courts of appeal. The paper quoted in the AFR article is "Conceptions of Collegiality", which Lee presented this year at the University of New South Wales and at the Australian National University in Canberra.
In the article, Lee uses a comparative analysis of the approaches in the High Court of Australia and the UK Supreme Court to argue that there are different understandings among the various Justices over how to judge on a multi-member court, and these differences appear in their decisions. Criticising the arguments offered by some current HCA Justices in favour of the practice of encouraging joint judgments, Lee argues that the approach leads to more judgments overall rather than fewer.
Lee's previous work on the topic includes: "A Defence of Concurring Speeches" (2009) and ‘A Comment on Collegiality and Collectivity in Common Law Courts’ in B Häcker and W Ernst, Collective Judging in Comparative Perspective: Counting Votes and Weighing Opinions (Intersentia, forthcoming, 2018).
Lee is Reader in English Law and PC Woo Research Fellow 2016/17 at The Dickson Poon School of Law, and has just finished a period of research leave as a Senior Visiting Fellow at Gilbert + Tobin Centre at UNSW's Faculty of Law.
Listen to a podcast of the ANU talk here. The text will be published in a collection from the UNSW event in 2019.
In this story
Professor of English Law