The decision of the High Court in Capital T.V. and Appliances Pty Ltd v. Falconer makes a further contribution to the step by step effort of the Court to develop a coherent doctrine with respect to the place of the Commonwealth Territories in the federal system. It goes some way towards answering the questions that arise with respect to the jurisdiction that may be exercised by territorial courts on the one hand, and on the other hand, the jurisdiction that may be exercised by federal courts, and State courts invested with federal jurisdiction, in respect of matters having a relationship with a Territory.

The matters decided were simply that the Supreme Court of the Australian Capital Territory is not a federal court, but is a territorial court established by virtue of the powers of the Parliament under section 122 of the Constitution, nor is it a court exercising federal jurisdiction. The Court did not find it necessary to decide whether the tenure of office of the judges of the Supreme Court met the requirements of section 72 of the Constitution with respect to federal courts. It held that, even assuming that those requirements were met, the Supreme Court was not a federal court. This conclusion was based on the intention of Parliament, as appearing from the words used to create the Court and the scope of the jurisdiction conferred on it. Further, it was held that the only courts “exercising federal jurisdiction”, apart from federal courts, are State courts invested with federal jurisdiction.

A number of questions concerning the construction and application of section 57 of the Constitution have now been determined by the High Court. The purposes of this note are to examine critically some implications of these answers and to direct attention to some other technical questions that could arise in the future. The special interest of the writer in these matters arises from the fact that he was closely involved in the preparation of documents in relation to the double dissolutions of 1974 and 1975 and the joint sitting of 1974.

It is not within the purposes of this article to discuss generally the extent to which the Governor-General may be entitled to exercise a personal judgment or discretion in granting or refusing a double dissolution. That is a matter of constitutional propriety rather than the justiciable constitutional law with which this article is concerned.

The only mention of juries in the Commonwealth Constitution is in section 80, which provides (inter alia) that “The trial on indictment of any offence against any law of the Commonwealth shall be by jury”. Apart from cases on the question what is meant by “ trial on indictment ”, there is not a great deal of authority on the constitutional questions that arise in relation to juries, civil and criminal, in federal jurisdiction.

The GaN on LGO system is the near perfect template (due to extremely high etch selectivity) for developing a viable thin film/compliant GaN substrate. Herein, we report on our efforts to grow GaN on LGO, including improvement of the microscopic surface morphology using pre-growthpretreatments. We also report on the first transferred thin film GaN substrate grown on LGO, transferred off of LGO, and mounted on GaAs. With this approach, (InAl)GaN alloys can be grown on thin GaN films, implementing a truly “compliant” substrate for the nitride alloy system. In addition, the flexibility of bonding to low cost Si, metal or standard ceramic IC packages is an attractive alternative to SiC and HVPE GaN substrates for optimizing cost verses thermal conductivity concerns. We have demonstratedhigh quality growth of GaN on LGO. X-Ray rocking curves of 145 arc-seconds are obtained with only a 0.28 μm thick film. We present data on the out of plane crystalline quality of GaN/LGO material. Likewise, we show 2 orders of magnitude improvement in residual doping concentration and factors of 4 improvement in electron mobility as compared to the only previously reported electrical data. We show substantial vendor to vendor and intra-vendor LGO material quality variations. We have also quantified the desorption of Ga and Li from the surface of LGO at typical growth temperatures using in situ desorption mass spectroscopy and XPS.