Welcome to Eureka Street

back to site

Keywords: Supreme Court

  • AUSTRALIA

    Building constitutional bridges: In conversation with Frank Brennan

    • David Halliday
    • 28 June 2024

    It's been eight months since the Voice referendum, and people are starting to grapple with what its defeat means for Australia. There are few voices in Australia as qualified to conduct a postmortem of the outcome of the Voice referendum campaign as Frank Brennan. We examine what lessons can be learned and crucually, whether there’s reason for hope for Indigenous constitutional recognition.

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    State-sanctioned child abuse serves no-one

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 20 July 2023
    1 Comment

    A Supreme Court judge in Western Australia has banned solitary confinement at Banksia Detention Centre, shining a light on the controversial practices within the nation's juvenile justice centres. Yet, public response remains muted despite the troubling revelations, raising concerns about systemic failures, the need for empathy and societal responsibility towards our youth.

    READ MORE
  • INTERNATIONAL

    America after Roe v Wade

    • Chris Middleton
    • 05 July 2022
    17 Comments

    The overruling of the Roe v Wade decision by the Supreme Court in the Dobbs decision marks a significant moment in the abortion debate, while highlighting the deep fissures in America’s body politic. Despite the fact that the Supreme Court ruling had been foreshadowed months ago, the shock has been real.

    READ MORE
  • RELIGION

    Roe vs Wade: The Bishops’ dilemma

    • Miles Pattenden
    • 26 May 2022
    19 Comments

    News leaked earlier this month that the US Supreme Court plans to overturn its most famous decision, that in Roe vs Wade (1973) which protects a pregnant woman's freedom to choose to have an abortion without excessive government restriction. The decision has attracted much criticism both in the past and now on account of its dubious legal reasoning – in particular, its attempt to link the right to abort to a right to privacy which itself was notional and not specified in the US Constitution.

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    Prison time for perpetrators but justice eludes victim of modern slavery in Australia

    • Rebecca Dominguez
    • 02 August 2021
    4 Comments

    Last month, a man and a woman were sentenced to between six and eight years in jail for intentionally possessing and exercising the right of ownership over a slave between 2007 and 2015 in Mount Waverley, Victoria. After arriving in Australia from the Tamil Nadu province in India on a 30-day tourist visa, the woman’s passport was taken from her and she was forced to cook, clean and care for the couple’s three children on an average $3 per day. 

    READ MORE
  • INTERNATIONAL

    Challenges to respect in the Kavanaugh case

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 17 October 2018
    4 Comments

    The charge brought against Kavanaugh invites reflection on what past actions and allegations should disqualify a person from holding public office. And in a society where increasingly traces of our past actions will be indelibly recorded, what scope should there be for remission and wiping the slate clean of past offences?

    READ MORE
  • INTERNATIONAL

    Men need to be stronger for each other

    • Devana Senanayake
    • 12 October 2018
    6 Comments

    Men need to understand that other men in their close circles are capable of behaving in a manner that they have not seen first-hand. They need to retrain themselves to exercise doubt and then act on it to encourage a fairer, more thoroughly investigated outcome. It is a question of morality and duty rather than interpersonal loyalty.

    READ MORE
  • INTERNATIONAL

    Kavanaugh and men's sexual assault hypocrisy

    • Catherine Marshall
    • 10 October 2018
    12 Comments

    Where many saw a woman smearing the name of an upstanding member of the legal fraternity, others saw a successful professional putting her reputation on the line to expose the harm done by a man being considered for one of the country's highest offices. Her allegations are believable to us precisely because they are so common.

    READ MORE
  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Inside Nauru nightmare

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 19 May 2016
    4 Comments

    With PNG's Supreme Court finding last month that the detention of asylum seekers on Manus Island was unconstitutional, the shamefulness of Australia's border protection policies was once again laid bare. Advocates will be familiar with the facts and arguments that Chasing Asylum articulates. What sets it apart is its wealth of hidden camera footage caught within the grim confines of the centre on Nauru, and Orner's conversations with detainees and social workers who bore witness to the dire daily reality there.

    READ MORE
  • INTERNATIONAL

    Cheque book solution on asylum is unconstitutional

    • Frank Brennan
    • 28 April 2016
    33 Comments

    A bench of five justices of the Supreme Court of Justice, the highest court in Papua New Guinea, has unanimously ruled that the detention of asylum seekers on Manus Island is unconstitutional. Yet again, Australia has been complicit in its Pacific neighbours (PNG and Nauru) prostituting their Constitutions and undermining the rule of law in exchange for a fistful of dollars, with hapless asylum seekers, most of whom are ultimately proved to be refugees, being left to languish.

    READ MORE
  • EUREKA STREET TV

    US Bishops reckon with same sex marriage support rollercoaster

    • Peter Kirkwood
    • 08 July 2015
    7 Comments

    Journalist Michael O'Loughlin is national reporter for Crux, the Boston Globe's regular supplement on Catholic Church issues. His book The Tweetable Pope: A Spiritual Revolution in 140 Characters, to be published in September. In this video interview, he analyses the US Bishops' response to the recent US Supreme Court ruling on same sex marriage.

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    The US Supreme Court's gay marriage overreach

    • Frank Brennan
    • 03 July 2015
    75 Comments

    In its determination that same sex couples have a constitutional right to marry, the US Supreme Court took it upon itself to discover a definitive answer in the silent Constitution on this contested social question. This is regrettable, because there can be no doubt that the democratic process was taking US society in only one direction, and the Court's unilateral intervention has reduced the prospects of community acceptance and community compromise regarding the freedom of religious practice of those who cannot embrace same-sex marriage for religious reasons.

    READ MORE