News

10 November 2009
Schemes, Takeovers and Himalayan Peaks Ed.2 the 7th monograph to be published by the Ross Parsons Centre of Commercial, Corporate and Taxation Law, will be launched at Freehills, Sydney on 12 November. Significantly larger and expanded from the first edition, the monograph is available for purchase from the Ross Parsons Centre for $150 (inclusive of GST, postage and handling)

4 August
Investor Class Actions, the 6th monograph to be published by the Ross Parsons Centre of Commercial, Corporate and Taxation Law was launched on 3 August 2009 by The Hon. Murray Wilcox QC at the Federal Court of Australia in Sydney. Mr Wilcox provided an overview of the five papers presented in the book and discussed some of the problems associated with investor class actions. View the address given by the Hon Murray Wilcox QC to launch Investor Class Actions.
Investor Class Actions can now be purchased from the Ross Parsons Centre for $59.95.

10 July 2009
Professor Joellen Riley is conducting a review on behalf of the NSW Government on the current and future operation of the public holiday legislation. The Attorney-General John Hatzistergos said the discussion paper, which Professor Riley will prepare, is scheduled to be available for public comment from 17 July 2009. To view the Attorney General's Media Release - Call for comment on NSW public holidays

7 July 2009
The Business Law Section of the Law Council of Australia has announced the Gaire Blunt Scholarship for 2009. The scholarship is aimed at persons at a junior stage of their career in Australia. To apply for the scholarship lawyers will need to submit a paper on a competition law topic of no more than 10,000 words by 31 December 2009. Application forms can be obtained from Carol O'Sullivan, . Additional information can be found here.

5 June 2009
Professor Henry T. Hu will deliver The 2009 Ross Parsons Address in Commercial, Corporate and Taxation Law on 12 June 2009 titled: "Decoupling," Governance, and the World Financial Crisis. Professor Henry T. Hu holds the Allan Shivers Chair in the Law of Banking and Finance at the University of Texas Law School.

In 2009, there will be two lectures to celebrate the move to the new Law building on the main University of Sydney campus. The second Address will be delivered by Professor Alvin C. Warren, Ropes and Gray Professor of Law, Harvard Law School titled Tax Policy after the Financial Crisis on 19 October 2009.

21 May 2009
Vivienne Bath (with co-author Robin Burnett) new book titled The Law of International Business in Australasia was recently published by Federation Press. The book provides a comprehensive discussion of the international and domestic law regime in Australia and New Zealand relating to international business transactions. It deals with international contracts for the sale of goods, international carriage of goods, financing, the multilateral and bilateral regime regulating trade in goods and services, issues relating to operating in foreign markets and resolution of international disputes. The book can be purchased from the Co-op Bookshop or Federation Press.

7 May 2009
Visit by leading UK expert in Taxation
Sydney Law School is pleased to announce the visit of Professor Malcolm Gammie CBE QC, a leading tax practitioner and teacher from the United Kingdom. The visit is sponsored by Greenwoods & Freehills Pty Ltd which has been sponsoring similar visits for over 15 years. Malcolm is noted as a leading practitioner in the commercial, European and international taxation fields. He will be presenting a course on UK International Taxation 13-19 May 2009, and will be speaking on UK tax reform on Tuesday, 12 May 2009. For further information on Malcolm, please visit www.malcolmgammie.com

20 March 2009
Justice Gummow of the High Court opened a torts academic workshop at the new law school on the main campus, attended by leading torts scholars from around Australia and overseas. The themes of the workshop were how to educate students for global practice and in an age where law is increasingly found in statutes. Convened by Associate Professor Barbara McDonald, the workshop was addressed by Professor Anita Bernstein of Brooklyn Law School and Professor Jane Stapleton of ANU, Oxford University and the University of Texas on teaching Tort Law in the United States and by Professor Paula Giliker, who holds a chair in Comparative Law at University of Bristol on teaching Tort Law in the UK in the European context. Other leading scholars who spoke included Harold Luntz, Jim Davis, Peter Handford, Peter Cane, Prue Vines, Joachim Dietrich, Christian Witting, Mark Lunney and Neil Foster making for a day of lively and informed discussion on many teaching and substantive issues in Tort Law.

11 March 2009
Australia has the most liberal class action regime in the world, a US legal expert told a seminar organised by the Federal Court of Australia and the Ross Parsons Centre yesterday. In an article titled 'Liberal' stance helps class actions: US expert in the Sydney Morning Herald, Professor Geoffrey Miller, a Professor of Law at New York University and Visiting Professor at Sydney Law School, said there were "gigantic" procedural differences between Australia and the US. The proceedings from the seminar titled: Investor Class Actions will be published in a monograph shortly.

24 February 2009
Professor Patricia Apps (with Ray Rees) new book titled:Public Economics and the Household was recently published by Cambridge University Press. Economic models in much of the public economics literature have been slow to reflect the significant changes towards double-income households throughout the developed world. This graduate-level text develops a more sophisticated approach to household economics, one that allows for multiple-income earners and shared decision-making. This approach is used to present a fundamentally new view of consumption. It then applies this to an analysis of tax systems, combining theoretical analysis of optimal taxation and tax reform with careful empirical study of the characteristics of income tax systems in four different countries: Australia, Germany, the UK and the USA. The book is particularly concerned with analysing, both theoretically and empirically, the impact of taxation on female labour supply, and identifying its effects on work incentives and fairness of income distribution. All this adds up to a fascinating new approach to the economics of household for researchers in both public and private sectors. The book can be purchased from Cambridge University Press.

13 January 2009
2009 will be a busy year at the Ross Parsons Centre with a number of events planned to celebrate the move to our new building on the main University of Sydney campus. Please visit our Seminars and Conferences webpage for further details of upcoming events in 2009.

24 November 2008
Brent Fisse, an Associate of the Ross Parsons Centre is featured in an article "Changes Allay most cartel code fears" in the Australian Financial Review in regard to new legislation to criminalise cartel behaviour which would make existing franchise and supply arrangements cartel behaviour under the original draft laws.

11 November 2008
Dr David Rolph's new book, titled Reputation, Celebrity and Defamation Law was recently published by Ashgate.
Drawing on approaches to celebrity in media and cultural studies, the author conceptualizes reputation as a media construct and explains how reputation as celebrity is of great contemporary relevance at this point in the history of defamation law. The book can be purchased from Ashgate Publishing.

25 October 2008
Professor Jennifer Hill was an invited speaker at a Conference on Corporate Restructuring: Theory and Practice at Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. Professor Hill's paper was titled “Contemporary Issues Concerning Schemes of Arrangement in Australia”. Professor Hill is pictured with Professor Ciyun Zhu, Tsinghua University and Dr Hui Huang, University of New South Wales.

23 October 2008
Greenwoods & Freehills International Visitor - Brian Arnold

The Ross Parsons Centre is pleased to host the third Greenwoods & Freehills International Visitor in 2008, Brian Arnold who is a tax consultant with Goodmans LLP, Toronto. Brian is a graduate of Harvard Law School (JD, 1969) and taught tax law at a Canadian law school for 28 years. He has been a consultant to various Canadian government departments, the OECD, the South African Revenue Service and the Australian and New Zealand governments on international tax matters. He teaches international and comparative tax at the University of Sydney, University of Melbourne, Harvard Law School and the University of Economics and Business Administration in Vienna.

Professor Arnold will be teaching Comparative Income Taxation at the the Law School on 23-29 October 2008 and participating in a seminar on international taxation on 30 October 2008 along with treaty officials from Australian Treasury and New Zealand Treasury. Greenwoods & Freehills has been a supporter of International Visitors for over fifteen years, an initiative which encourages tax education and discussion of international taxation issues with leading overseas professors and practitioners.

21 October 2008
The Credit Crunch and the Law is published today. This timely monograph about the current Credit Crisis and the Law can be purchased by completing an order form or in person from Level 12, Sydney Law School, 173-175 Phillip Street, Sydney, NSW 2000.

24 September 2008
Staff from the Ross Parsons Centre attended the Society of Legal Scholars Annual Conference held in London recently. Professor Elisabeth Peden and Associate Professor Barbara McDonald presented papers in the Contract and Commercial and Torts subject sections respectively. Further details regarding the Society of Legal Scholars can be found here.

16 September 2008
The Credit Crunch and the Law - Monograph 5 (forthcoming)

The Credit Crunch and the Law will be the 5th monograph to be published by the Ross Parsons Centre in its successful monograph series. The monograph will be edited by RP Austin, Justice of the Supreme Court of New South Wales and Challis Lecturer in Corporate Law at the University of Sydney. Publication is expected in late October 2008. Further details will be added to the Monographs website shortly.

11 September 2008
Vivienne Bath, Senior Lecturer presented a seminar at the British Institute of International and Comparative Law (BIICL) titled: "The Globalisation of Chinese Law". Further details can be found here.

20 August 2008
Ross Parsons Address - Professor John C. Coffee

Professor Coffee, Adolf A Berle Professor of Law at Columbia University Law School delivered the Ross Parsons Address in Corporate Law. Professor Coffee's Address was titled Financial Crises 101: What Can We Learn From Scandals and Meltdowns - From Enron to Subprime. The Address was given as the keynote lecture of the Third Annual Supreme Court and Law Society of New South Wales Conference on Corporate Law 2008 on The Credit Crunch and the Law. The address was recorded as a Podcast and can be downloaded at the Sydney Law School website.

27 June 2008
Parsons Centre Monograph Series features prominently in CAMAC Discussion Paper on Schemes

In 2004, the Ross Parsons Centre commenced a Monograph Series. Monograph 1 of this series was Tony Damian and Andrew Rich, Schemes, Takeovers and Himalayan Peaks. This book features prominently in the Corporations and Markets Advisory Committee Discussion Paper, Members’ Schemes of Arrangement (“the CAMAC Discussion Paper”), which was recently published in June 2008.