We are now in the Anthropocene, a time in the earth’s four-billion-year history when human activities are affecting the planet to such an extent that humans have become a ‘significant geological force’. The risks facing humanity also challenge the rule of law. Ideally, law operates to help keep a society stable, peaceful and ordered. Since law is ‘the principal means of implementing public policy’, law must evolve to play its part. Lawyers have a key role to play in assisting that evolution, and the ethics that govern lawyers’ work will play a large part in determining its success. This chapter focusses on the work of lawyers in addressing climate change and environmental damage. Such work raises important issues about lawyers’ role generally and the values and ethics underpinning that role. In this chapter we consider how the different ethical approaches (adversarial advocacy, responsible lawyering, moral activism and ethic of care) are informing lawyers’ actions on behalf of the planet. Of course, many lawyers will draw from several ethical approaches in their work. Likewise, all four approaches can support efforts at law reform, which we discuss later in the chapter.

[35.1] In a society in which it is often said that the quantity, variety and sources of law made by or under the authority of parliaments is expanding at a significant rate, resolving apparent conflict is a staple activity of the courts. Interpretative resources are drawn on to resolve such conflict.

A lot has been written recently about the emergence of a ‘global society’ in which economies, cultures and political systems of different nations have started to coalesce. Perhaps unsurprisingly, these commentaries have often taken the form of binary debates ߝ ‘globalisation is all-encompassing’ vs ‘globalisation is pretty irrelevant’; ‘globalisation is the glorious road to the future’ vs ‘globalisation is the road to hell’; ‘globalisation is a fundamentally economic issue’ vs ‘globalisation is really about cultural homogenisation’. Generally speaking, these binaries aren’t helpful, and the phenomenon of globalisation deserves a less reductive and more thoughtful analysis, as it increasingly affects us all ߝ particularly within the sphere of education.

[22.1] This chapter addresses the common law where it is part of the history of an Act and so forms part of its wider context. This is distinct from using common law as a precedent, or as part of the wider contextual surrounding law.

[32.1] The task of an interpreter is to determine the intention of Parliament ‘assisted by such aids to construction as can properly be utilised’.1 This chapter considers residual common law presumptions and aids that are potentially available.

This chapter argues that the relationship between popular culture and the classroom remains a contentious issue. Its presence has been used as a symbol of how much our culture has declined and how educationally corrupted our schools have become, while its absence has been used to suggest our schools are out of touch with their primary constituency ߝ young people. This is not a simple issue to address; even the notion of ‘culture’ itself is subject to considerable disagreement.

Previous Parts have examined contextual aids beyond the Act that are supplied by the legislative history (Part V) and Interpretation Acts and other Acts of general application (Part VI). Part VII continues in the same vein and examines other interpretative criteria beyond the Act concerned.

[26.1] This chapter builds on chapter 25, which examines the role played by Interpretation Acts. Unless expressly or impliedly disapplied, an Interpretation Act applies to all Acts passed by the same legislature. But an Interpretation Act is not the only Act that applies to other individual Acts. Across the statute book of a jurisdiction there is a range of Acts that support the operation of individual Acts. Some have a broad application, such as a Human Rights Act. The application of others depends on the subject matter of the individual Act.

[1.1] Statutory interpretation is a many-faceted thing. It is a substantive body of law and a process involving a set of skills. It is distinct from (but overlapping with) the application of the law. It is not wholly different from the interpretation of ordinary speech. But it is dissimilar in major respects from formulating the ratio decidendi or the rule of a case. Functionally, statutory interpretation resolves a question of law between parties to a dispute. It also contributes to law-making in the sense that the text of the statute, read with the interpretation, constitutes a new understanding of the law.

This chapter considers how the structure and processes of the regulatory systems that govern the legal profession are relevant to lawyers’ ethics and behaviour – that is, the significance of institutions for lawyers’ ethics. In this chapter we consider ways in which the ethics demonstrated by the legal profession as a whole are likely to affect lawyers’ individual and personal ethics. We begin by discussing how our current approaches to regulating the legal profession might, or might not, embody and engender the values that should characterise legal practice. We then focus on the ‘law of lawyering’ – rules and regulatory regimes that have been created to apply specifically to lawyers under the legislation and case law governing the legal professions of each of the States and Territories. The next section provides a brief history of the development of Australian legal professional regulation, before contrasting this with a different regulatory approach that sees market competition as the fairest and most efficient form of professional regulation.

[25.1] Each Australian jurisdiction has an Act dealing with the interpretation of the Acts of that jurisdiction.1 Such Acts are referred to in this book, including in this chapter, as ‘Interpretation Acts’, irrespective of their actual title.

[41.1] A statute has extraterritorial operation if it operates on, or purports to regulate, occurrences or conduct that occur either wholly outside the territory of the enacting legislature (whether federal or state), or partly within and partly outside the territory.

In this chapter, neoliberalism will be examined in more detail in relation to the ways in which it has reorganised and reconstituted schooling and education. Neoliberalism will be approached from a sociological perspective as the prevailing ‘mentality’ or ‘rationality’ of liberal rule in the West today. From this standpoint, neoliberalism can be understood as a systematic way of thinking about governance that focuses on neoliberalism’s new understanding of the market and its significance for all domains in society, including education. Marketisation will be considered from the sociological perspective as a major ‘technique’ of the neoliberal formula for rule.The chapter will discuss the competitive marketisation of schools; the construction of parents as consumers and teachers as entrepreneurs; and the philosophical underpinning of mass education by the logic of the free market. Of equal importance, it will consider the ‘performative’ character of neoliberalism.

[21.1] Legislative antecedents are the enactments that constitute the historical legislative development of the statute or statutory provision being interpreted, such as repealed statutes and successive amendments to the statute made by the same Parliament. Antecedents may also include statutes made by other parliaments where it can be inferred that the statute being interpreted is derived from that other statute.