The origin of the Commonwealth's Bills of Exchange Act 1909 is a guarantee of its efficiency. By the 1870's the merchants of the United Kingdom had worked out for themselves, with the help (and occasionally subject to the hindrance) of the courts and Parliament, a remarkably effective system of conducting commercial transactions by means of bills of exchange, cheques and promissory notes.

The Engineers' Case was regarded by many at the time as establishing a standard of interpretation for the Constitution that did not involve aresort to implications-or at any rate made it less likely that the Court would resort to implications. The ‘implications’ with which the judgments in the Engineers’ Case were concerned involved two distinct but connected doctrines—

(a) the reserved powers of the States.

(b) the immunity of instrumentalities (Commonwealth and State).

In the first issue of this journal, Mr R. E. McGarvie, Q.C., examined, ‘from a lawyer's viewpoint the way in which Commonwealth industrial arbitration is operating sixty years after the commencement …’ of the Commonwealth Conciliation and Arbitration Act. Limiting himself ‘to an examination of the working of the Commission in the exercise of its arbitral powers’ he nevertheless acknowledged that the system, the tribunal and the concept of Commonwealth industrial arbitration have been subject to a variety of criticisms.

The primary purpose of this article is to discuss the Australian statutory law applying to civil aviation. There will also be some consideration of one or two unresolved questions involving the application of common law rules, selected not only because of their intrinsic interest, but also because they are partly affected by Federal and State Acts of Parliament.

Mr Justice Holmes' view that payment of taxes should not be begrudged-as they are the price of civilisation-is of course not shared by the vast majority of tax-paying citizens.

In Fishwick v. Cleland, one of the contentions put by counsel for the plaintiff was that the Papua and New Guinea Act 1949-1957 was invalid as inconsistent with the Charter of the United Nations and the Trusteeship Agreement—

The power of the Commonwealth to pass [the Act] depends either upon s. 51 (xxix) of the Constitution or upon s. 122.3 Section 51 (xxix) does not grant power to pass legislation inconsistent with or contrary to a validly existing treaty.... Even if s. 122 does apply, the powers granted by that section are limited by the purposes and prohibitions of the Trusteeship Agreement in the same way as those granted by s. 51 (xxix).... [I]f the Commonwealth relies upon the external affairs power, and relies upon a treaty as feeding that power, it must confine itself, broadly, to carrying the treaty into effect.

The Constitution of Ceylon2 confers on the Parliament of Ceylon full power ‘ to make laws for the peace, order and good government of the Island ’. Section 29 (4) of the Constitution provides that.