James Allan holds the oldest named chair at the University of Queensland School of Law. Before arriving in Australia in February of 2005 he spent 11 years teaching law in New Zealand at the University of Otago and before that lectured law in Hong Kong. Allan is a native born Canadian who practised law in a large Toronto law firm and at the Bar in London before shifting to teaching law. He has had sabbaticals at the Cornell Law School and at the Dalhousie Law School in Canada, the latter as the Bertha Wilson Visiting Professor in Human Rights.
Allan has published widely in the areas of legal philosophy and constitutional law, including in all the top English language legal philosophy journals in the US, the UK, Canada and Australia, much the same being true of constitutional law journals as well. Allan’s latest book, a monograph for the Ashgate Applied Legal Philosophy series published in June 2011, is entitled The Vantage of Law. Allan also has a sideline interest in bills of rights; he is opposed to them. Indeed he is delighted to have moved to a country without a national bill of rights. He has been actively involved in the efforts trying to stop one from being enacted here in Australia. He also writes widely for newspapers and weeklies, including The Australian, The Spectator Australia and Quadrant. And since arriving here in Australia he has given or participated in more than 65 lectures, debates and talks.
Posted: 11:53 am on 16th April 2012
Yesterday I debated the merits of federal systems of government with Joel Fitzgibbon, Federal Member for Hunter and Professor AJ Brown on ABC Radio National Sunday Extra. Fitzgibbon argues for the abolition of the states; Brown opts for a middle path he calls ‘intelligent federalism’; and I think the only workable form of federalism is competitive federalism, which I believe is far better than one-size-fits-all centralism. The so-called cooperative federalism…
Posted: 8:00 am on 28th February 2012
Nearly two decades ago I practised law in Canada in a big Toronto law firm in the area of commercial litigation. Here the parties were almost always big corporations and, barring the very unusual, they made decisions about whether to sue or not based on dispassionate cost-benefit analyses. Take the likely chances of winning, throw in how much was at stake, don’t forget the possible expense of paying a chunk…
Posted: 8:00 am on 19th January 2012
I know that the rivalry between the English and French has a longstanding history. And those of us born into the English-speaking world probably were taught all about the great eighteenth-century victories of our side in north America on the plains of Abraham and in India. No doubt French-speakers are taught about their victories too, though aside from helping the American colonists to independence it’s not immediately obvious what they…
Posted: 11:28 am on 16th December 2011
I leave it to my fellow contributors to this blog site to detail the ways in which the euro currency has been like a slow-acting poison in Europe. Here I simply want to point out the obvious. That from the outside looking in the European Union has been on balance bad for the United Kingdom. Yes, this supra-national body that not so long ago was held by many, especially by…
Posted: 1:44 pm on 29th November 2011
So the results are in across the Tasman, or at least most of them are in. The centre right National Party under centre left leader John Key has won 48% of the vote, which gets it 60 of the 121 seats in Parliament under the German-style MMP voting system used over there. Put more bluntly, you win a landslide and you don’t get a majority leading a few people who…
