Category Archives: Law

TOPIC: Physician-Assisted Suicide Should Be Legal.

1.Describe The Assignment And Explain The Purpose Of A Persuasive Speech.

2. Explain The Historical Context Of Your Topic. (For Example, If Your Topic Is The Death Penalty.)

3. Describe The Steps You Took To Analyze The Audience For Your Persuasive Speech. How Did You Apply Your Audience Analysis To

TOPIC: Physician-assisted suicide should be legal.

1.Describe the assignment and explain the purpose of a persuasive speech.

2. Explain the historical context of your topic. (For example, if your topic is the death penalty.)

3. Describe the steps you took to analyze the audience for your persuasive speech. How did you apply your audience analysis to your speech?

4. Describe two opposing perspectives that you encountered while researching for this….

In ‘Criminal Law and Cyberspace as a Challenge for Legal Research’ (2012) 9(3) Scripted, B-J Koops argues that (notes omitted):

Cyberspace should interest everyone who is involved in criminal law. The classic view of cybercrime, centred on the lonesome, nerdy hacker, is largely based on fiction, a fiction from the 1980s and 1990s. Reality has changed dramatically, causing a step-change in cybercrime and its consequences for the ‘real world’. Cybercrime is no longer about peer reputation among whiz kids, it’s all about money — big money. A considerable black market caters for all kinds of criminals, where you can buy a bunch of credit-card numbers (including the codes on the back) for a couple of dollars, or rent a network of zombie computers for an hour to spread….

In introducing the draft provision that was later enacted as s 477.3 (Unauthorised impairment of electronic communication) of the Criminal Code Act 1995 (Cth), the report of the Model Criminal Code Officers Committee of the Standing Committee of Attorneys-General, Chapter 4 — Damage and Computer Of ences and Amendments to Chapter 2: Jurisdiction, January 2001, pp 171–3, noted that the offence:

… has an extremely broad band of application, from harms which are transient and trifling to conduct which results in serious economic loss or serious disruption of business, government or community activities. The prohibition would be breached by conduct which impaired communication of a single message of no importance.

Given that the offence carries a maximum penalty of imprisonment for 10 years, how are different levels of….

A Bergin and C Ungerer, ‘Homeward Bound: Australia’s New Counter-Terrorism White Paper’, Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), Policy Analysis no. 57, March 2010, note:

There are more than 4,000 terrorist-related websites worldwide. Ideas cross borders through cyberspace. We aren’t going to ban our way out of this problem. Cyberspace affords individuals access and anonymity in an extremist environment and the ability to find like-minded extremists in thousands of chat rooms and social networking sites.

To what extent can any government respond to online terrorist propaganda without compromising the availability and use of the Internet for legitimate, however contentious, political discussion and debate? How and where should the dividing line between free speech and community safety be made?

In J E Cohen, ‘Pervasively Distributed Copyright Enforcement’ (2006) 95 Georgetown Law Journal (online), the author suggests that:

In an effort to prevent online copyright infringement and protect established business models, the major copyright industries have developed and aggressively pursued a portfolio of strategies designed to implement a regime that I will call pervasively distributed copyright enforcement. These strategies rely on a range of tools including technologies that restrict the range of permitted information use, contractual regimes for authorizing ‘compliant’ implementations of those technologies, legal prohibitions against interfering with the resulting techno-contractual regimes, other legal rules broadly distributing responsibility for policing communications networks, and publicly inculcated norms of appropriate user behavior. In aggregate, they are designed systematically to shift the locus of control over intellectual consumption and communication….

n an opinion piece entitled ‘The Tentacles of Extradition’ (, 26 October 2012), the legal reaction to Griffiths’ extradition on copyright charges is described:

In 2007 former NSW Chief Judge in Equity, Justice Peter Young, highlighted in the Australian Law Journal ‘the bizarre fact that people are being extradited to the US to face criminal charges when they have never been to the US and the alleged act occurred wholly outside the US.’

… Justice Young pointed out at the time that ‘although International copyright violations are a great problem … there is also the consideration that a country must protect its nationals from being removed from their homeland to a foreign country merely because the commercial interests of that foreign country are claimed to have been affected….

K-K R Choo, ‘Responding to Online Child Sexual Grooming: An Industry Perspective’, Trends and Issues in Crime and Criminal Justice no. 379, Australian Institute of Criminology, July 2009, describes the process of online grooming as follows (citations omitted):

Child grooming, a premeditated behaviour intended to secure the trust and cooperation of children prior to engaging in sexual conduct, is a process that commences with sexual predators choosing a location or target area likely to be attractive to children. A process of grooming then commences during which offenders take a particular interest in their child victim to make them feel special with the intention of gaining their trust. As trust is developed between the child victim and the offender, offenders then seek to desensitise child victims to sexual conduct….

In the online child grooming case of R v Gajjar [2008] VSCA 268 (18 December 2008), the Victorian Court of Appeal was asked to consider arguments that the sentence imposed was excessive, considering the fact there had been no actual child involved, with police instead posing as 14-year-old ‘Lisa’, and that there had been a degree of entrapment. The court responded, at [44]–[46]:

It has been observed, correctly in our view, that the fact that there was no actual child victim in this case does not of itself exclude imprisonment as a sentencing outcome. The offence is designed to be preventive. It is likely to be detected only through the use of undercover police techniques.

We reject the submission that there was an element of entrapment in what….

D Keats Citron and M A Franks, ‘Criminalizing Revenge Porn’ (2014) 49 Wake Forest Law Review 345; University of Maryland Legal Studies Research Paper No. 2014-1, state at p 347 (notes omitted) in reference to the United States:

Revenge porn victims have only recently come forward to describe the grave harms they have suffered, including stalking, loss of professional and educational opportunities, and psychological damage. As with domestic violence and sexual assault, victims of revenge porn suffer negative consequences for speaking out, including the risk of increased harm. We are only now beginning to get a sense of how large the problem of revenge porn is now that brave, outspoken victims have opened a space for others to tell their stories. The fact that non-consensual porn so often….

Under U.S. constitutional law, a “minimum rational basis” test is used in the context of homosexuality: the government’s aim must be legitimate, and the means must be rationally related to this aim. Romer v. Evans, 517 U.S. 620 (1996) (invalidating under rational basis test state constitutional amendment barring government agencies from adopting rules or policies that provide homosexual, lesbian, and bisexual classes protection against discrimination).

Note that Article 21 of Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union prohibits discrimination on the basis of disability. Is this an emerging customary international legal norm? Has the United States accepted the norm by adopting the Americans with Disabilities Act?