Opinion

There is very little I love more than free things. I’m pretty sure the only pens I own are branded ones I’ve picked up from law firms at LSS events; I’m a sucker for merch, and they give it out liberally. It’s probably because it’s so rare to find free stuff that I like it. Mostly, things are expensive due to the cost of living, inflation, all those ugly economic words I don’t appreciate seeing in the news. Very, very few things are free, including The Law. There are the cost

Picture this: an AI system, running autonomously on servers somewhere in Sydney, makes a series of financial decisions that wipe out a small investor’s retirement savings. The investor wants to sue. But whom, exactly? The Silicon Valley company that wrote the base model? The Melbourne fintech startup that fine-tuned it? The cloud provider that hosted it? Or the algorithm itself? Image from Pinterest This is an emerging reality, and the law in Australia, like most legal system

On December 3rd 1854, as the sun started to rise over Ballarat, Victoria, 120 miners and their families awoke suddenly from their tents to find 276 British soldiers storming over their flimsily built stockade. Within 15 minutes, at least 6 soldiers and 22 rebels had been killed, with other estimates reaching as high as 60.[1] These miners and their supporters had been killed for protesting the exorbitantly high licence fee to mine, their lack of a right to vote, and continued

*Disclaimer - Chelsea does actually do her law assignments. If you are one of her professors or her parents, please disregard the article below. I love theatre. Ever since being shoved up onto a stage to go and dance at three, I have trodden the boards more than I care to admit. After having a firm ‘I am going to be a professional dancer and music theatre performer’ era, I subsequently decided to stick to University Theatre during my gap year. Before recommencing my studies i

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Image from Pinterest There is a specific hollowness of the ANU Law Library at 2:00 AM. I am sitting beneath the low, flickering lights, and the air is thick with the chemical sugar smell of my three empty Red Bulls mixed with that familiar scent of old law books. For a second, it’s comforting; it’s the smell of a library, after all, until you remember that you’re literally just breathing in the dust of 1980s case law. Around me, a fortress of highlighters in varying states o

Read the influence problem to understand how exposure, repetition and suppression can be used to manufacture your consent and norms.

Image from The Sydney Morning Herald For a generation of constitutional republicans, 1999 marks a ‘sliding doors’ moment many of us weren’t even alive to see. Of course, I am referencing the Australian ‘republic referendum’, a blueprint forged from enduring, 19th-century ambition, yet nonetheless foiled at the hands of perceived obligation. As we approach nearly thirty years since the referendum’s failure on the grandest stage, surveying the recent coups calling to further un

Image from Pinterest I. The Chasm In 2024, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to the team behind AlphaFold—an AI system that predicts protein structures with near-experimental accuracy, solving a problem that had resisted fifty years of scientific effort.¹ What previously took years of laboratory work now takes seconds at negligible marginal cost. Drug candidates that once required billions of dollars and more than a decade of human research are being generated in months at a

Michael Kirby is one of Australia’s most prolific High Court judges, known for his judgments and dissents, as well as his extra-judicial writings and general icon-status. This article explores what it is about Kirby that delights and divides, and the motivation behind his many, many dissents. Radical Restraint Justice Michael Kirby 1998, Ralph Heimans, oil on canvas One of my favourite things about studying law is getting to know the judges. It’s one of the quirks of the degr