James Upcher

James Upcher reviews ‘Conversations With The Constitution: Not Just A Piece Of Paper’ by Greg Craven

February 2005, no. 268 • 09 September 2024

The Australian Constitution contains no aspirational statements of national possibility or sweeping vision of collective virtue, but the founders did not intend the Constitution’s meaning to remain fixed. It was to function as a prism of our national self-understanding, and its elaboration and development should aim, in the words of Alfred Deakin, to ‘enable the past to join the future, withou ... (read more)

‘Letter from the Netherlands’ by James Upcher

August 2005, no. 273 • 01 August 2005

I was looking at Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s De Toren van Babel in Rotterdam, where I had gone for the day to escape the low skies and oppressive winds that buffet The Hague in springtime. Bruegel’s masterpiece has an exquisite stillness and delicacy, despite portraying the Tower of Babel in its first stages of busy construction. Ladders and wires are hung from its sides; the harbour on which i ... (read more)

James Upcher reviews 'The Milošević Trial: Lessons for the conduct of complex international criminal proceedings' by Gideon Boas

March 2008, no. 299 • 01 March 2008

At the time of his death in March 2006, Slobodan Milošević had been on trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (the ICTY) for more than four years. Greeted initially as a victory in the ‘struggle against impunity’, the progress of his trial was soon hindered by thickets of procedural argument and by the cunning of Milošević himself. Diverting attention from e ... (read more)

James Upcher reviews 'The Fluid State: International Law and National Legal Systems' edited by Hilary Charlesworth

May 2006, no. 281 • 01 May 2006

What role should international law play in the domestic legal sphere? The author of the Institutes of Justinian stated that ‘[e]very community governed by laws and customs uses partly its own law, partly laws common to all mankind’. Nevertheless, a certain view propounds that international law is an unstable or subversive intrusion into the processes of democratic sovereignty and the pedigree ... (read more)

James Upcher reviews 'No Country is an Island: Australia and international law' by Hilary Charlesworth et al.

October 2006, no. 285 • 01 April 2006

Alexander Downer, when asked on the ABC in February 2003 about the legality of military measures against Iraq, was keen to emphasise Australia’s fidelity to international law: ‘We’ve reached a point where you either take international law seriously and ensure that Iraq does comply with international law or else you abandon the whole concept, at least in this case, of trying to enforce intern ... (read more)

James Upcher reviews 'God Under Howard: The rise of the religious right in Australian politics' by Marion Maddox

April 2005, no. 270 • 01 April 2005

Campaigning during the 1912 US presidential election, the great labour leader and socialist Eugene Debs used to tell his supporters that he could not lead them into the Promised Land because if they were trusting enough to be led in they would be trusting enough to be led out again. In other words, he was counselling his voters to resist the easy certitude that zealotry brings; to reject a politic ... (read more)