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Logically incontestable
Created 02.01.2008 - 16:06

Comments: 

This case concerned the proper interpretation of the conciliation and arbitration power in the Australian Constitution. One submission by counsel for the states was that disputes are either industrial or non-industrial, an argument which Sir Victor Windeyer ironically described in the following terms:

Counsel for the States started with the proposition that disputes are either industrial or not industrial. That is logically incontestable; and, as was said by counsel in Repton v Hodgson in a sentence which Jordan CJ brought to light in an essay, ‘Like Sinclair’s well-known division of sleeping into two sorts, namely, sleeping with or sleeping without a nightcap, it would seem to exhaust the subject’. But the presence or absence of the quality ‘industrial’ in a dispute is not as indisputably apparent as the presence or absence of a nightcap on a sleeper. And to collect a miscellany of diverse elements referred to in different judgments as characteristics of industrialism, and treat them all as either collectively or individually significant, so that the presence or absence of one may be decisive is, in my view, fallacious. It can lead to a sophistic sorites.

Case citation: 

Ex parte Professional Engineers Association (1959) 107 CLR 208, 272.

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Cite as: Jaani Riordan, ‘Logically incontestable’ (2008) Jaani.net Internet Law and Technology <http://www.jaani.net/law/quotes/australia/high_court_of_australia/logically_incontestable>.
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