Category: Chris Nyst
  • Chris Nyst

RIP Satts

This week saw the sad passing of the great South Sydney Rugby League legend, John Sattler, one of the toughest footballers to have ever pulled on a jersey, a true gentleman of the sport who was loved and respected by all.
  • Chris Nyst, Defamation

Fake News and Tall Tales

"How dramatically the digital world seems to have jumped way ahead of our institutions and the protections they offer to citizens."
  • Announcements, Chris Nyst, Crime fiction novels

Chris Nyst Releases New Crime Novel – ‘Millen’

After a long hiatus, Chris Nyst has returned to crime fiction writing with his latest novel, Millen. It is a gripping legal thriller that features the same irrepressible Gold Coast lawyer, Eddie Moran, who featured in Chris’ previous two critically-acclaimed novels - Gone, which was shortlisted for the New South Wales Premier's Literary Award, and Crook as Rookwood, which won the prestigious Ned Kelly Award for Crime Fiction in 2006.
  • Chris Nyst, International

The First Blink

No doubt the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, is an avid student of history. Wherever it was that he learned it, he certainly seems to know that, in a tense game of Cold War diplomacy, the minacious art of brinkmanship can often be absolutely everything.
  • Chris Nyst, Human Rights, Opinion

Brick By Brick

- Originally published by Ocean Road Magazine edition #45, Summer 2022. On the morning of Sunday, 13 August 1961, the citizens of the German capital, Berlin, awoke to an unfamiliar flurry of activity on their streets. During the night before, at the witching hour of midnight, under the orders of the East German Communist Party leader Walter Ulbrict, police and military units had begun sealing off the border between the Soviet-controlled east of the city and the west. By daylight, they had torn up the streets along the border, rendering them unusable, and lined them with barbed wire entanglements and fences that would ultimately stretch all along the 156 kilometres surrounding the three western sectors of the city.
  • Announcements, Chris Nyst, Criminal Law, Jonathan Nyst

Jonathan Nyst Shortlisted For Law Award

As the proud father, and principal of Nyst Legal, I am extremely chuffed to be able to announce that this week, for the second year in succession, my youngest son, and Nyst Legal Senior Associate, Jonathan Nyst, has been shortlisted as one of the finalists in the Criminal Law division of the national Lawyers Weekly 30 Under 30 Awards.
  • Chris Nyst, Criminal Law, Jonathan Nyst

Shortlisted For Criminal Law Gong

Nyst Legal Associate Jonathan Nyst was this week shortlisted as one of 10 finalists in the Criminal Law division of the national Lawyers Weekly 30 Under 30 Awards.
  • Chris Nyst, Opinion, Politics, Privacy

A Right To Know

Don’t you sometimes miss the good, old-fashioned Moral High Ground? As a post-war baby, the world I was born into seemed a brave and righteous one. Our fathers had just fought and died to free us all from fascism and oppression. The world had paid a terrible price, but it was all worth it.  In the end we won, and the Bad Guys lost.
  • Chris Nyst, Criminal Law, Opinion

The Means To The End

About ten years before the birth of Christ the great Roman poet Publius Ovidius Naso, in his collection of epistolary poems known as The Heroides, coined the Latin phrase Exitus acta probat, which translates roughly to the often-quoted mantra ‘The end justifies the means’. It is a sentiment celebrated by the Italian Renaissance writer Niccolo Machiavelli in the 1500’s and enthusiastically embraced by a long list of authoritarian dictators throughout history. Thankfully, it has no place in the criminal justice system of any modern western democracy.
  • Chris Nyst, Criminal Law, International, Opinion, Politics

Ten Guilty Witches

In February 1692, in a secluded village in the isolated British American colony of Massachusetts, 9-year-old Betty Parris and her 11-year-old cousin Abigail Williams, began to behave very strangely indeed. It seems they had recently taken to screaming, ranting and raving, throwing objects hither and thither, making weird noises, and generally behaving in a way the local reverend described as “beyond the power of epileptic fits or natural disease to effect.” When other young females in the same village started to exhibit similarly disturbing symptoms, the good folk of Salem quickly concluded there was witchcraft at work in their town, and decided it was time to take action.
  • Chris Nyst, Entertainment, Opinion

Richard Carter – A True Gentleman

I was very saddened to hear this week of the passing of Rick Carter, the great Australian actor and comedian, with whom I worked on Gettin’ Square, a film I wrote and co-produced in 2003. A veteran of scores of classic Aussie films, including Muriel's Wedding, Babe, Rabbit Proof Fence, The Great Gatsby and Mad Max: Fury Road, and a long list of successful television series, Rick was an icon of the Australian entertainment industry over four decades of work.
  • Chris Nyst, Criminal Law

In Defence Of The Defence

This week the Queensland opposition launched a robust attack on a centuries-old criminal law defence. The 'mistake of fact’ defence was encoded into Queensland law in 1899 when our Criminal Code was first enacted, adopting a common-law notion dating back at least as far as pre-Norman England, that criminal liability requires some sort of actual subjective culpability, whether based on moral guilt or negligence. Section 24 of our Code provides that a person who does something under an honest and reasonable, but mistaken, belief as to a particular fact, they are not criminally responsible to any greater extent than if that belief was correct.