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Read about crucial legislation changes, discover life behind-the-scenes at Johnston Withers, learn more about what we do, and read about our landmark wins.
In the 1990s, Johnston Withers Lawyers (through former director and now special counsel Richard Bradshaw) along with Paul Heywood-Smith QC (at the time junior counsel and, prior to that, one of the Johnston Withers Lawyers’ directors) acted in a highly influential and long-running defamation case: Chakravarti v Advertiser Newspapers Ltd.
Parliament has for some time been facing increased pressure from media publishers to amend Australia’s uniform defamation laws to strike the right balance between a person’s right to freedom of speech and the need to protect a person’s reputation from slander.
The High Court Decision in Commercial Bank of Australia Ltd v Amadio forced banks to behave more ethically in the future management of mortgages.
Buying property? With the market booming, settlement dates have become a big topic of conversation between conveyancers and clients. Here’s what you need to know about choosing a conveyancer early and getting the settlement date right.
Buying off the plan has become very popular among foreign persons looking for residence or investment. Australia has a foreign investment framework where foreign persons generally need to apply to the Foreign Investment Review Board (‘FIRB’) for approval to purchase residential real estate in Australia.
The 2015 Supreme Court of South Australia case of Duffy v Google Inc. and the 2017 Full Court Appeal are well known amongst defamation lawyers throughout Australia as highly significant decisions. They determined that Google and other search engines can be liable as secondary publishers of defamatory material authored and/or posted by others where search results reproduce such material.