Judges

A environmental group has lost its challenge to the extension of the Mount Pleasant open cut coal mine in NSW operated by MACH Energy, with a judge finding the planning commission considered greenhouse emissions and did not merely pay “lip service” to the issue.

The Australian Conservation Foundation has reached an agreement with Woodside Energy to drop proceedings over the company’s Scarborough gas project in Western Australia, which alleged the $16.5 billion joint venture could not go ahead until its climate impacts were assessed. 

The lead plaintiff in a class action alleging NSW Police conducted illegal strip searches at music festivals has argued the state cannot rely on a defence that the searches were a reasonable exercise of power, after a recent judgment found the defence does not apply to unlawful arrests.

Start-up Element Zero has attacked search orders won by Fortescue over the alleged misappropriation of the mining company’s confidential information by three former employees, calling the orders an “industrial scale forensic debacle” won on weak evidence and the failure to disclose material information.

HWL Ebsworth has won indemnity costs against a former client who alleged the firm gave negligent advice over property in Parramatta’s ‘Auto Alley’, with a court saying the client was the “author of the outcome about which it complains” by rejecting a $1.35 million settlement offer.

Former Melbourne Demons chairman Glen Bartlett has been given the green light to relaunch a defamation case against the AFL club’s president and other senior officials after discontinuing proceedings that were transferred from his home state of Western Australia to Victoria.

The liquidator of failed global financial services firm Babcock & Brown is seeking to permanently stay a shareholder suit it says is an abuse of process, nearly five years after three other cases against the liquidator were thrown out.

The top judge of the NSW Supreme Court, which has seen a precipitous drop in class actions, has defended his court and taken shots at the Supreme Court of Victoria and the Federal Court for embracing contingency fees for class action lawyers.

An appeals court has rejected oOh!media’s claim that it was denied procedural fairness in a dispute with Transport for NSW, saying judges are not required to give a “running commentary” on oral submissions and that counsel must be “constantly alert” when appearing in court.

General Motors has failed to overturn a decision that put it on the hook for the applicant’s full costs in a partial settlement in a class action on behalf of Holden dealers, with an appeals court finding GM could not “walk away” from the ordinary meaning of the phrase ‘the plaintiff’s costs of the proceedings’.