Court Of Final Appeal : A Solicitor V Law Society Of Hong Kong

On the surface, it seems that determining how much power courts have would be a simple task. However, history has proven this to be false. The courts have been viewed in many different ways through out the history of our country. There are three common views of court power that are important for modern scholars of the court system. Those who believe courts have little power to cause social change are said to adhere to the Constrained Court view. Those who believe courts have a great deal of power to cause social change are said to adhere to the Dynamic Court view. The final, and youngest, take on court power combines aspects of the Constrained and Dynamic views into what I shall call the Condition Dependent Court view of power.

The appellant company (Youyang) was trustee of a discretionary trust formed in 1974 for the Hayward family. Minter Ellison Morris Fletcher’s (Minters) had been acting for EC Consolidated Capital Limited (ECCCL) since July 1991, all work in connection with the drafting of the documents relating to the subscription for preference shares in ECCCL was dealt with by Minters. As part of the subscription agreement Youyang deposited $500,000 in Minters trust account. Minters was entitled to release a section of the fund from the trust account to ECCCL for the purchase of a bearer deposit certificate to be issued by Dresdner International Financial Markets (Australia) Ltd (DAL), which could then be traded on the money market. When the certificate was obtained Minters then had the right to release the remainder of the funds to ECCCL based on the subscription agreement.

Jurisprudence explores what would be the simplest manifestation of law so as to create a civil society society where both individual liberty and normative goals are practiced. Should the the aim of law be primarily centered on the protection of individual liberty or, instead, the normative goals geared toward the benefit of of civil society? The laws in any society ought to not be centered on normative goals it ought to conjointly defend individual liberty.

Critically assess the applicability of this statement as an analysis of the current approach of the judiciary to statutory interpretation in Australia.

To be sure, modern laws are made to express the general will, a will that aims at the common good. This means that laws in most cases intend to protect every social member’s rights under the principle of justice and fairness. For telling examples one need to look no further than American judicial system. The access to the two courts systems, one federal court and one state court, provides citizens with the greatest potential to have their legal problems

The Australian Constitution is a rich amalgam of various classical political principles. The concepts of the Rule of Law and the doctrine of the Separation of Powers evident in Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws are both salient examples of political theses that are central to Australian Constitutional Law. The structure of the Constitution itself and decisions of the High Court of Australia unequivocally validate the entrenchment of the doctrine separation of powers in the Commonwealth Constitution . In particular, the High Court has applied this with relative rigour with respect to the separation of judicial power. The separation of the judicial power is fundamentally critical to upholding the rule of law. The High Court in Wilson v Minister for Aboriginal Affairs noted that “the separation of the judicial function…advances two constitutional objectives: the guarantee of liberty and, to that end, the independence of Chapter III judges” . Kitto J in R v Davidson also identified that the judiciary should be subject to no other authority but the law itself . This is a critical aspect ensuring the concept of legal equality is upheld. Therefore, its role clearly extends to providing checks and balances on the exercise of power by the legislative and executive arms of government . This ensures the liberty of the law and limits the abuse of the judicial system. Judicial Power is defined as “the power which every sovereign must of necessity have to decide between its subjects

Manifesto sees the decision of the supreme court as “clear abuse of judicial power” (1).

There have been many complaints and theories of how the Supreme Court has a tendency to act as a "supra-legislature" (Woll 153). It is proposed that the Supreme Court takes the

It is recognised that Australia’s System of decision making in the court is in need of reform, if the

Some judges in their obiter dicta have declared their inclination to disregard the Parliament’s legislative objectives, and therefore limit parliamentary sovereignty if the rule of law is vulnerable or if the circumstances demand “a principle established on a different hypothesis of constitutionalism” . They have also suggested that, while the British Constitution is dominated by parliamentary sovereignty, “The rule of law enforced by the courts is the ultimate controlling factor on which our constitution is based” . This represents a possibility of stretching the dominance of the rule of law in constitutional law so that it becomes more powerful than parliamentary sovereignty in the British Constitution .

In its Bato Star judgment, the Constitutional Court referred to the interpretive approach followed in the Jaga v Dönges, a notorious case from the 1950s. In this essay, I argue that the recent comments by the Constitutional Court about the case clearly show that the Jaga judgment is no longer relevant to the interpretation of statutes after the democratic transformation.

A majority of judges even said obiter that Parliament could not extend its lifetime beyond five years, even if the 1911 Act was to be expressly repealed and the extension bill then passed. That leads to the question if there are basic constitutional rules that parliament simply cannot change. Lord Steyn and Lord Woolf held that the courts might have to revisit the principle of parliamentary sovereignty, if Parliament sought ‘to abolish judicial review of flagrant abuse of power by government or even the role of the ordinary courts in standing between the executive and citizens’. In such an event, the court might have to ‘qualify’ the supremacy of Parliament, ‘a principle established on a different hypothesis of constitutionalism’.

The rule of law is a difficult concept to grasp and proves elusive to substantive definition. However, the following work considers the attempts of various social and legal theorists to define the concept and pertinent authorities are considered. Attitudes and emphasis as to the exact shape, form and content of the rule of law differ quite widely depending on the socio-political perspective and views of respective commentators (Slapper and Kelly, 2009, p16), although there are common themes that are almost universally adopted. The conclusions to this work endeavour to consolidate thinking on the rule of law in order to address the question posed in the title, which is at first sight a deceptively simple one.

If the judiciary are intentionally straying into matters of governmental policy then they as unelected, impartial adjudicators should only do so when cases arise that call for such action, potentially when governmental action threatens the rule of law – a right afforded to them as a constitutional check on governmental power. While the judiciary can be viewed as in a constant skirmish with the Legislature and the Executive much of the judiciary’s power to interoperate statutes liberally comes from powers delegated to it by parliament .

The judges in the lower courts are bound to follow previous decision of the higher courts. It is an essential component of the common law as it is important of adequate law reporting. It is a decision of the court used as a source for future decision-making.