The Critical Judgments Project

The prevailing legal realist school of thought holds that judging involves not merely the application of facts to law but, at least in hard cases, it is also influenced by the values, background and life experiences of each judge hearing the case. On that premise, critiques of judicial decisions are from time to time advanced from perspectives said to differ from those of the judge who decided them. This interesting book, inspired by the feminist judgments project, takes this school of thought to a logical conclusion. Associate Professor Gabrielle Appleby and Professor Rosalind Dixon of UNSW have invited a number of leading scholars to draft a seventh judgment for the now infamous High Court case of Monis v The Queen (2013) 249 CLR 92. Each contributor adopts a particular critical viewpoint in drafting his or her “judgment”. The editors justify their choice of the decision in Monis on three bases. First, it involved a difficult constitutional question, namely the application of the doctrine of implied freedom of political communication. Second, the Court was constituted by only six judges and, remarkably, their Honours split 3:3 and along gender lines. Third, the case is of enduring public interest as a result of Mr Monis’ actions in perpetrating the Martin Place siege in 2014, which directly resulted in the death of two innocent hostages. … The Critical Judgments Project - Re-reading Monis v The Queen is commendable to anyone interested in understanding the relationship between specific perspectives or theoretical frameworks and judicial reasoning. Its editors challenge us to “identify and assess the influence of personal, social, political and economic factors in the development of legal doctrine”. - Queensland Law Reporter - 3 February 2017 - [2017] 04 QLR

Dr Gabrielle Appleby is an Associate Professor at the University of New South Wales. She is the Co-director of The Judiciary Project at the Gilbert + Tobin Centre of Public Law. Gabrielle researches in public and constitutional law, and is particularly interested in the constitutional integrity of the exercise of public power and the regulation of the judicial branch. She has published widely in leading national and international journals. She has published a number of books, including The Tim Carmody Affair: Australia’s Greatest Judicial Crisis (NewSouth Publishing, 2016); The Role of the Solicitor-General: Negotiating Law, Politics and the Public Interest (Hart Publishing, 2016), Government Accountability (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Australian Public Law (2nd ed, Oxford University Press, 2014) and Public Sentinels: A Comparative Study of Australian Solicitors-General (Ashgate Publishing, 2014). She is the Chief Investigator on the Australian Research Council Discovery Project, Law, Order and Federalism. Gabrielle has previously worked in the Queensland Crown Law office and the Victorian Government Solicitor’s Office.

Rosalind Dixon is a Professor of Law at the University of New South Wales. She is Director of the Gilbert + Tobin Centre of Public Law Comparative Constitutional Law Project, and Deputy Director of the Herbert Smith Freehills Initiative on Law and Economics. Her work focuses on comparative constitutional law and constitutional design, theories of constitutional dialogue and amendment, socio-economic rights and constitutional law and gender, and has been published in leading journals in the US, Canada, the UK and Australia, including the Cornell Law Review, University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law, International Journal of Constitutional Law, American Journal of Comparative Law, Osgoode Hall Law Journal, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies and Sydney Law Review. She is Co-editor, with Tom Ginsburg, of a leading handbook on comparative constitutional law, Comparative Constitutional Law (Edward Elgar, 2011), and a related volume, Comparative Constitutional Law in Asia (Edward Elgar, 2014), Co-editor (with Mark Tushnet and Susan Rose-Ackermann) of the Edward Elgar series on Constitutional and Administrative Law, on the editorial board of the Public Law Review, Journal of Institutional Studies, and Associate Editor of the Constitutions of the World series for Hart publishing. She previously served as an Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago Law School.