The Common Law?
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 costs of enforcing it (the costs of trials, court administration, police fees, etc), and then there’s the cost of our system actually in action. It’s the costs of the latter that worry me.
First and foremost, let’s start close to home. As I’m sure you’re all aware, a Law degree is not cheap – I was born at the wrong time; I long for the days of Gough Whitlam subsidising tertiary education. At ANU, for a Law Honours single undergraduate degree, a domestic student paying for their degree outright (without HECS) will spend roughly $176 640 in fees.1 International students pay $213 120.2 Everyone is bound by it, but actually learning the law and how it applies is pricey.
Then, on top of course fees, there are textbooks. I’ve heard whispers of other disciplines that upload whole chapters of textbooks online. For Law courses, you might get a link to the full case, which is helpful, but is also about twenty pages longer than the extract you need. Law students are nothing if not time-poor, so you kind of actually want to get your hands on a textbook, if only to save yourself some time.
Pirating, obviously very wrong and terrible and not something anyone ever does because there are so many excellent sites with huge databases, seems a bit iffy when you’re pirating law textbooks. Also, theoretically, it might be difficult to find the exact textbook, particularly when it’s a new edition. The library has a limited number of copies, and rolling the dice on whether someone is monopolising it when you need to do your readings gets old pretty fast. That leaves buying the textbook. Let’s say each textbook is $100 – we all know I’m rounding down there – and only twelve of your twenty-four Law subjects require a textbook. By the end of your degree, you will have donated $1200 to publishing houses. Perfect. Just what I wanted.
On the bright side, you might be able to recoup some costs by selling your textbook next year, provided the publishers haven’t released another edition with maybe three new cases and a changed chapter order. And only if you have a hard copy – they make it really hard to download online ones, and you only get access for about a year, which is criminal because you pay the same amount as if it were a hard copy and you could access it forever. The more I think about it, the more I know those Swedish prophets (ABBA) were right: it’s a rich man’s world.
Once you graduate, the cash outlay is stymied. No more paying for your degree; just for the honour of actually being able to practice!
To be admitted as a lawyer in Australia, you must undertake Practical Legal Training (PLT). If you’re lucky, you get a job with a firm and you don’t have to pay for it, with the slight downside that you’re then somewhat tied to that firm for a couple of years, until that investment is paid off. At the College of Law, PLT costs $9200 for domestic students, $13 270 for international students.3 The cheapest PLT in Australia is run by the Institute of Legal Training, with a flat rate of $6000 for international and domestic students.4 Then, once you’ve completed PLT, there’s just a cheeky filing fee for admission applications ($756 in the ACT,5 $950 in NSW),6 which might also get covered by your firm, and there you go! Lawyer!
(Of course, to continue being a lawyer, you need to pay an annual renewal of your practising certificate. In NSW, from 2026-27, the fee is $550, regardless of the type of law you practice.7 In the ACT, it varies depending on the type of law and the type of certificate.8 In private law, an unrestricted practising certificate costs $1,605, and a restricted certificate costs $987. For a government lawyer, an unrestricted certificate is $982, with a restricted certificate being $684. In-house, $1,380 for unrestricted, $987 for restricted. Again, this might get covered, depending on your employer, and not be your problem. Still, it is a cost of practising law, one you pay directly if you have your own chambers.)
All up, becoming a lawyer is pretty expensive (fingers crossed AI doesn’t do us out of a job before I can pay it all back) and pretty time-consuming. That’s sort of just the gig.
The good news for law students or lawyers is, once you have a degree, paying it off is easier, especially since lawyers’ time is expensive, which ironically is bad news for anyone who needs a lawyer, and for the justice system as a whole.
Property, contracts, estates, family law; they’re all more ‘opt-in’ for legal services than, say, criminal law for people without law degrees. Access to legal services is variable, depending on the geographic area and the type of work. Conveyancing for a property in Canberra might be between $1000 to $2200.9 A simple will might cost $600, a complex one up to $3000.10 The cost might depend on the location of the client as well, and their ability to actually contact a lawyer.
Given the costs, a lot of people might organise matters in these areas without any assistance from a lawyer. You can talk to the real estate agent. You can get a DIY will kit for $30, no need for a solicitor.11 The only problem, of course, is if things go wrong. Your contract was dodgy, but you’re still bound by it; your divorce settlement is unfair; the house is actually a health hazard, but the real estate says it’s your hazard now, congratulations! Now what?
Well, getting a lawyer might be a bit less of an optional extra. If you’re lucky, you might just need some advice, and the matter can be sorted without any need for further legal action. If both sides aren’t budging, things get a bit more dire.
Litigation is messy. It’s drawn-out, and ugly, and expensive, and usually unsatisfying. Even the threat of court might be enough to encourage disputes between the general public to be resolved by settling – and I do mean settle in both the technical legal and the colloquial sense. Take a custody dispute. If one partner has significantly more resources than the other, it’s not hard to imagine an agreement being drawn up benefitting that party, rather than the other party taking the gamble of going to court and hoping their partner is ordered to pay their costs. Even if the other party does pay your costs, that’s well after the majority of the costs have been incurred. The delay is not only a financial drawback, but in family law cases, it’s a big reason to settle out of court. No one wants their kid to see that custody battle.
The adversarial system isn’t well-suited to preserving familial bonds, and court orders are unlikely to have the flexibility necessary for the evolution of these relationships. While a parenting order from the court might be great when a legal barrier is needed to regulate a parental relationship, there’s little wiggle room. If a child decides they want to stay an extra night with one parent, or if pick-up times need to change – it’s a violation of a court order. The legal system doesn’t really work very well for providing solutions to domestic problems, unless it’s more of a criminal issue than one of more general familial discontent.
For other cases, like torts or contracts, the delay and cost of litigation are similarly off-putting. Just for daily court fees, a junior barrister might charge $3000, a senior barrister costing more like $5000.12 You can see how an individual or a smaller company may be coerced into taking a settlement rather than taking the chance on the justice system. Going to court in and of itself is a bit of a loss, not only with the cost but because it’s unlikely you’ll get what you want. And what’s more, people might not actually understand why they lost their case. It’ll turn on a small technical detail, described in legal jargon by precedents they’ve never heard of. It must take a lot of trust, to let this lawyer argue a point you don’t really understand the relevance of, in the hope that they’ll get you the result you want.
Though the law requires a high level of linguistic precision – and even that phrase is a bit pseudo-intellectual – I can’t help but think there’s an element of elitism there as well. Some judgements seem to deliberately obfuscate (see? That’s a law word, why can’t you just say hide?) the point. They beat around the bush, they pull out a thesaurus for words that don’t need synonyms, they drop Latin phrases like they’re hot potatoes. Some of this is obviously historical – there is a long tradition in law that writings must be formal, and judgments referencing ratios from old cases are obviously going to have some dense prose. Some of this might be that it genuinely is a complex area of law that cannot be summarised any further, or perhaps that judges are so used to the jargon and legal style of writing that it’s second nature.
But some of this seems a bit like continuing the tradition of making lawyers seem smarter than they are. An ego trip to make people think that no one can do what they do. Admittedly, throwing so much jargon at people that they just give up on understanding the industry isn’t something only lawyers do; the financial sector is somewhat notorious for it – that’s how we get finance bros rabbiting on about hedge funds and stock market portfolios. But making things more difficult to understand in law seems disingenuous at best, and deliberately obstructive to a public understanding of law at worst.
Australia has swathes of codified law. Like a ridiculous number of statutes, and provisions within those statutes. But common law is still a substantial element of Australian law, for examples of definitions of offences and application of statutes, or to clarify principles like reasonableness or proportionality. Despite this, most common law is locked behind paywalls. For big cases, you might get lucky and AustLii has it. But for cases on very specific parts of law, or cases tried in the Supreme Courts, chances are that you’re only going to find them on a database you need to pay to access. Law in statute is already inaccessible enough simply in terms of wording, particularly for those without strong English literacy, but adding a class barrier to access the common law on top of the linguistic obscurity just seems ridiculous.
What makes this even more insane is that ignorance of the law isn’t an excuse for criminal offences.13 Say someone is a particularly legally-conscious citizen, who wants to do the right thing. They could have waded through the extensive Crimes Act of a particular state, and be confident they’re not breaking the law, and then get charged because it might not be an element of an offence defined in statute, but it is in common law – law they can’t access unless they pay. Or maybe they found it online, or they did pay, but they didn’t understand it.
How can something that we’re all bound by be stuck behind a paywall? How can we hold people responsible for something they did that they didn’t know was wrong, because they didn’t pay to access that particular case? How can we penalise people for not knowing the law when knowing the law takes an extensive and expensive university degree? How is it that people have to pay for the right to have their case properly heard? Does that mean if someone can pay more, their chance of achieving ‘justice’ goes up?
How can it be the common law if it literally isn’t common?
References
[1] ‘Standard Tuition Fees 2026’, Australian National University (PDF) <https://d1zkbwgd2iyy9p.cloudfront.net/files/2025-09/Schedule%20of%20Tuition%20fees%202026.pdf>.
[2] Ibid.
[3] ‘How Much Does Practical Legal Training Cost?’, College of Law (Webpage) <https://www.collaw.edu.au/practical-legal-training/how-much-does-plt-cost/>.
[4] ‘Practical Legal Training (PLT): Everything You Need to Know’, Institute of Legal Training (Webpage) <https://iolt.com.au/plt-detailed-information>.
[5] ‘Admission as a Legal Practitioner’, Australian Capital Territory Supreme Court (Webpage) <https://www.courts.act.gov.au/supreme/forms/admission-as-a-legal-practitioner>.
[6] ‘Schedule of Fees’, Legal Profession Admission Board (Webpage) <https://lpab.nsw.gov.au/documents/fee-schedules-/LPAB_Schedule-of-Fees-2025-2026.pdf>.
[7] ‘Renewing Your Practising Certificate’, Australian Capital Territory Law Society (Webpage) <https://www.actlawsociety.asn.au/practising-law/practising-certificates-1/renew-pc>.
[8] ‘2026/27 Scale of Fees’, Law Society of New South Wales (PDF)
[9] ‘How Much are Conveyancing Costs in Canberra’, Independent Property Group (Webpage, 17 November 2025) <https://independent.com.au/insights-advice/how-much-are-conveyancing-costs-in-canberra>.
[10] Alasdair Duncan, ‘How Much Does a Will Cost in Australia?’, Canstar (Webpage, 22 April 2024) <https://www.canstar.com.au/life-insurance/will-cost/>.
[11] Ibid.
[12] ‘Solicitor and Barrister Prices’, Lawyers and Legal Services Australia (Webpage)
<https://www.legallawyers.com.au/legal-topics/law-firm-sydney/solicitor-prices/>; Julia Tran, ‘What Are the Standard Costs for a Lawyer Per Hour?’, Lawpath (Blog Post, May 21 2024) <https://lawpath.com.au/blog/what-are-the-standard-costs-for-a-lawyer-per-hour>.
[13] Ostrowski v Palmer (2004) 218 CLR 493, 500 [1] (Gleeson CJ and Kirby J), 515 [49] (McHugh J).
