Exposing the Failings of Our Betters: Bad Laws Don't Improve with Age (Supreme Court of Victoria: King V Smail, 1958) (Essay‪)‬

A continuing tension exists between practising lawyers (practitioners and judges) who are unable to choose which cases make up their work and the academic gadflies who may cherry-pick. The standard academic method is to treat most decisions of the lower courts as beneath contempt, decisions of the appeal courts as obviously unsound, and to begrudge those of the highest court as right but for the wrong reasons (and to delight in pointing out the logical flaws). This gadfly offers his analysis of a 'wrong' decision in land law that has stood for nearly half a century and recently been reaffirmed as 'correct'. INTRODUCTION