Category: Opinion
  • Chris Nyst, International, Opinion, Sport

How Sweet It Is

As a longtime lover of the ‘Sweet Science’, I felt a secret sense of satisfaction in watching the measured way in which Floyd “Money" Mayweather defeated the game and garrulous UFC world champion Conor McGregor on the weekend, with an emphatic TKO in the 10th round of their scheduled 12-round bout in Las Vegas Nevada.
  • Criminal Law, Opinion

Doli Incapax – Youngest Offender Ever Charged With Murder

In the early hours of the morning following Australia Day last year, 26 year old Patrick Slater was found dead in a Perth railway station, a 25cm chest wound had penetrated his aorta and both lungs. Last week, in the WA Supreme Court, five young adults and one teenager were found guilty of his murder. But not all those allegedly involved in the incident actually went on trial. The youngest – just 11 years of age at the time – remains in legal limbo, awaiting his fate. At that tender age, he achieves the unenviable record of being the youngest person ever to be charged with murder in Australia.
  • Chris Nyst, Entertainment, Hollywood, International, Opinion

The Bird Is Coming

I read a news story just the other day about a self-declared “grammar vigilante” who reportedly prowls the streets of Bristol, in south-west England, correcting errant punctuation on business signs. Apparently for the past decade or so he has been venturing out late at night, wearing a coat and black hat, to surreptitiously correct sloppy grammar on many of the city’s billboards. Carrying an eight-foot-long tool he refers to as an “apostophiser,” which allows him to correct punctuation marks on elevated signs, he has rectified scores of signs, including such public abominations as “Potato’s for sale”, “Amy’s Nail’s, and Cambridge Motor’s.”
  • Chris Nyst, Criminal Law, Opinion, Politics

Parole On Trial

The Prime Minister’s call for an overhaul of state parole laws in the wake of this week's terrorist attack in Melbourne has the sniff of political scapegoating.
  • Chris Nyst, Criminal Law, Human Rights, Opinion, Politics

Fixated Folk

This week I learned something kind of crazy that I never knew before.A gentleman came to my office complaining that five police officers had recently materialised at his front door, without warning or invitation, wanting to conduct a psychiatric assessment on him. It all sounded more than a little bit bizarre to me but, since the gentleman appeared otherwise quite lucid, I tried to dig a little deeper, in the hope of understanding what it may be all about. He didn't really know. The best he could tell me was the officers concerned were apparently attached to something called the Fixated Persons Unit. 
  • Chris Nyst, International, Opinion

The Better Part Of Us

The 1959 German film Die Bruecke by director Bernhard Wiki is set in the final days of World War 2, as American tanks drive the Allied victory home on German soil. In a small German village seven young schoolboys declare their fierce determination to defend their country against the American invaders. When they are called to bolster the army’s badly depleted ranks the boys are all elated, but their teacher secretly entreats a company sergeant to spare them from combat, knowing Germany’s defeat is by now inevitable.
  • Chris Nyst, Human Rights, Migration, Opinion, Politics

Fair Go Australia

What goes around always seems to come around again. In February 1862 a familiar advertisement appeared in the employment columns of the London Times newspaper. It read simply "WANTED: A smart, active girl to do the general housework of a large family, one who can cook, clean plates, and get up fine linen, preferred. No Irish need apply."
  • Chris Nyst, Dispute Resolution, Family Law, Opinion, Politics

Santa Ban

It seems like people can always find something to fight about, even at Christmas time. I guess that's why most lawyers love January so much. After a week or so of full-on festivity, soaking up the ho-ho-ho’s in the sweltering summer sun, cooped up with the ever-loving spouse and those dear sweet visiting in-laws, eating too much, drinking too much, staying up too late and waking up too early, if folk can’t find a good reason to consult a lawyer first thing in the new year, chances are they never will.
  • Chris Nyst, Human Rights, Opinion

The Genteel Silence

The complaint this week from would-be patrons of a popular Adelaide hotel that they were refused entry on racial grounds, has reopened some old wounds, and focused attention on sadly unfinished business. Claims by aboriginal woman Taylor Power-Smith and her indigenous friends Peter Miller Koncz and his wife Kahlia that they were turned away from the Palais Hotel because of their aboriginality, raised more than a few ghosts of our often shameful past.
  • Chris Nyst, Criminal Law, Dispute Resolution, Litigation, Opinion

The Man On The Clapham Omnibus

Lawyers are well acquainted with the Reasonable Man. After all, he’s each and every one of us, although in truth none of us at all. He’s everyone and no one, the theoretical mean of human mores, the universal yardstick of all that’s fair and reasonable.
  • Chris Nyst, Criminal Law, Entertainment, International, Opinion

The Education Of Amasa

The Bible tells us that the sinner Saul was struck down on the road to Damascus. In a sudden flash of light from heaven, he experienced a divine, life-changing epiphany. For most of us the getting of wisdom follows an infinitely more gradual and circuitous path.
  • Chris Nyst, Criminal Law, Hollywood, Opinion

Stool Pigeons & G Men

G men love stoolies. It’s a fact of life. Over the centuries, the one thing that has most frustrated the work of ‘government guys’ – the regulators of all shapes and sizes, the G men, the Jacks, the fuzz, the heat, the traps, the Johnny Hoppers, federalies, wallopers, flatfoots, boys in blue, whatever you want to call them – the one thing that has most frustrated their valiant efforts to rein in the miscreant criminal milieu has been the unshakeable conspiracy of silence that has long existed between partners in crime.