The enormous State Library of QLD billboard that actually says very little.

If you’re in Brisbane or coming to Brisbane in the next few weeks, Afterglow in the City Botanic Gardens as a part of the Festival is great.

We were very pleased to get the news today that the Australian National Dictionary Centre will be saved, thanks to an anonymous donation and the halt on involuntary redundancies under the Renew ANU plan. We thank everyone for their generous support through these difficult times.

Two entirely different issues several generations apart, both requiring a warning.

A very good explainer by Carolyn Holbrook of the broader messy problems at the AWM.

The deep irony of WA’s parliamentary scrutiny committee for delegated legislation spending so much time agonising over cat regulations when it could not and did not scrutinise the hundreds of “rules” made under delegated legislative power during COVID. www.abc.net.au/news/2025-09...

It feels tragic that virtually every point made about universities and their challenges by VC Medley of UniMelb in the UQ Macrossan Lecture of … wait for it … 1945 … could be written today, albeit in modern phrasing.

So the strong warning to lawyers about use of Gen AI without verification articulated in R (Ayinde) v London Borough of Haringey, Al-Haroun v Qatar National Bank QPSC [2025] EWHC 1383 is starting to play out.

Not that I didn’t know the International Military Tribunal for the Far East was never forecast to take so long but found two letters today in the Qld State Archives with President Webb confidently saying it’d all be over by July. July 1946. Also he enjoyed a luncheon with Gen MacArthur.

On the nostalgia walk of Brisbane this week. This is “The Mansions” where Sir William Flood Webb, Prez of the IMTFE, lived as a young man. Boarded up at present while yet another pair of skyscrapers is built. Hope renovation is on the horizon.

To sum up, War Memorial leadership doesn’t accept expert advice from its own senior historian and makes things worse. It’s not complicated. Just face up to your blunder about centring BRS in the Afghanistan story … /1 www.theguardian.com/australia-ne...

I may or may not have heard a sitting High Court justice suggest it’d be fun to borrow a tank from the War Memorial.

Wtf can’t people write without presuming it’s always the same season at the same time everywhere in the world. Original author Adam “the correct date of my birthday is in Autumn”, not Jess who has posted this article.

This is beyond farcical. www.theguardian.com/world/2025/s...

BRS is a war criminal. Australia convicted many Japanese war criminals of war crimes to the requisite standard of proof for criminal liability. See our books brill.com/display/titl... and 2/

It remains legally safe to refer to him as a war criminal.

Come and study with us! It'll be fun! Applications are open for the Australian War Memorial Summer Scholars program, to be held in Canberra next Jan-Feb. Apply here: www.awm.gov.au/get-involved...

Ah, the sweet smell of consequences at last. www.theguardian.com/law/2025/sep...

I give you the “Sabbatical Spritz” at Brunetti’s, Flinders Lane, Melbourne. It seemed most appropriate.

Ahahahaha. Tell me again how GenAI is of unparalleled economic benefit.

@austhistassoc.bsky.social is there any update on the AHA research project to justify and defend the monograph in history?

A tremendously good thread 👏

Sensible voices have been trying to draw attention to the likelihood that sovereign citizen / pseudo law nonsense will result in violence.

Interesting discovery. So if you ask Google if calling someone a terrorist is an exercise in free speech, there’s an “AI Overview” provided. It’s as fence sitting as you’d expect. If you insert Israeli or Hamas into that search sentence … no AI. Just links.

Last week in Sydney, we saw a melodrama acted out that could stand in for the state of Australian universities more generally.

Check out entirely misleading image caption in this article. Gen AI doesn’t make it “easier to learn” at all. It deprives students from learning knowledge and skills themselves, from critical thinking to writing. www.smh.com.au/national/nsw...

How lovely! It’s never too late to study. www.abc.net.au/news/2025-08...

'In a groundbreaking new book, Language Machines, the American scholar Leif Weatherby goes to the heart of the matter: our tendency to confuse linguistic fluency with intelligence.' 1/3

Delighted to watch Edelman J of the High Court give the annual lecture tonight @ Murdoch University. However, I reckon 60 mins of watching him give carefully nuanced answers to random questions posed by the audience would be equally as interesting! So much food for thought during and afterwards.

Can’t say redacting practitioner names seems appropriate. Embarrass the hell out of any lawyer who has ignored all professional guidance from bars and societies (and some courts) and the absolute glut of media on “hallucinations” www.austlii.edu.au/cgi-bin/view...

For comparison, Microsoft Office 365 has 345m paid subscribers worldwide. The idea that ChatGPT will conjure up five times that amount in just a few years isn't just hypothetical, it's fantasy. These people are delusional.

Rape is rape. Every rape is violence. The pedantry of his appeal on the “characterisation” of the rape is appalling www.abc.net.au/news/2025-08...

Here we go again but at least referred to the Legal Practice Board, itself under a Parliamentary inquiry into how its regulating the profession … www.theguardian.com/australia-ne...

Congratulations to Justice Michael Lee on being appointed to the High Court of Australia by The West Australian 🤦🏻‍♀️

Everyone involved in teaching Australian law or in or around the legal system should watch this due to the impact pseudolaw nonsense has on both the system and the hardworking people who have to put up with it.

Whooeeee! Full docket here. www.courtlistener.com/docket/69694...

In today’s “Future Campus” on new appts to ANU Council. I get the point about Ministerial picks but this is really downselling, if not actually an insult to, former Chief Justice Martin of Western Australia who was also on the various advisory boards for the WA based law schools.

And law is no better.

No, Hein, my research is not going to get easier and I definitely do not want to “imagine” anything with your database polluted by AI Summaries which might tell me the legal factoid equivalent of gluing cheese on pizza or eating rocks. #legalresearch #yeetAIintothesun

100%, looking at you too @curtinuniversity.bsky.social

So there is a worse term than an “AI vegan” @drdrehistorian.bsky.social It’s an AI virgin. We’ve potentially gone from users eating AI to having sex with it. Actually some people have already probably deluded themselves into thinking they are, given the odd folk who have “married” their AI friend.

This. Not letting the AI techbros run the country with their demands for free access to our data and endless govt spending to facilitate them. Not tax cuts for big business. This. www.abc.net.au/news/2025-08...

The Productivity Commission offers novel interpretation of the term “mandatory guardrails” … www.abc.net.au/news/2025-08...

Surprisingly, hundreds of years do not need to pass to properly disseminate and discuss other events in the past. Just massacres of indigenous people, apparently. Boo. www.theguardian.com/australia-ne...

Yeah, no. Categorically no.

Australian law peeps, I give you the top 20 list of law journals according to Google Scholar (at least as many as I can fit into a screenshot). All but one are US based … no, wait a minute so is the German Law Journal. All of them are US journals.

This is basically my argument about why Sir William Flood Webb is regarded poorly at the International Military Tribunal for the Far East. I’ve tracked repeated criticisms back to a US lawyer who wasn’t even IN Tokyo and his footnotes to the transcript don’t sustain his critique. 1/2

If anyone doubted that Universities Australia is on the side of management, not uni students and workers, see UA’s CEO defending vice-chancellors’ $1m+ salaries