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costargh:
http://www.dandenongleader.com.au/article/2007/11/19/25539_osv_news.html


--- Quote ---Owner to fight compulsory acquisition

Adrian Ballantyne

19Nov07
Business owner Paul Rodrigues

Business owner Paul Rodrigues

A DANDENONG businessman has vowed to take legal action after a compulsory acquisition offer for his property short-changed him more than $1 million.

Planning agency VicUrban last week offered $750,000 for the property, near Dandenong Station, despite owner Paul Rodrigues selling it to a Gold Coast developer for $1.8 million.

Mr Rodrigues signed a contract of sale with Knight Property Investments in November last year for the Greenland Place property but had not reached final settlement.

But VicUrban seized the property under compulsory acquisition law as part of its Revitalising Central Dandenong project, making the contract redundant.

Mr Rodrigues branded VicUrban's move dictatorial and vowed to fight them in court.

``Saddam Hussein never did anything like this,'' Mr Rodrigues said.

``He's not going to take your property off you and give you a couple of bucks for it.''

Compulsory acquisition law allows for Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal and Supreme Court appeals if parties cannot agree on the compensation amount.

But VicUrban development director Michael King said the agency was still waiting on an independent valuation of the property  before a negotiation process could begin.

``I understand that he's upset but this is only the first step in the process,'' Mr King said.

``All the valuations have to be done on a market value,'' he said.
VicUrban had now secured 50 per cent of the properties it planned to acquire in Dandenong, Mr King said.

VicUrban's Revitalising Central Dandenong project involves the redevelopment of much of Dandenong's CBD, the construction of a new City Walk precinct and the new George St Bridge.

--- End quote ---


Thoughts?

Pencil:

--- Quote from: "costargh" ---
Thoughts?
--- End quote ---


It's not a house, it's a home!
bahaha

costargh:
Lol Ionic Australian film.

brendan:
[b]Do Judges Vary in Their Treatment of Race?[/b]
David S. Abrams and Marianne Bertrand
Does the legal system discriminate against minorities? Systematic racial differences in case characteristics, many unobservable, make this a difficult question to answer directly. In this paper, we estimate whether judges systematically differ in how they sentence minorities, avoiding potential bias from unobservables by exploiting the random assignment of cases to judges. We measure the between-judge variation in the difference in incarceration rates and sentence lengths between African-American and White defendants. We perform a Monte Carlo simulation in order to explicitly construct the appropriate counterfactual, where race does not influence judicial sentencing. In our data set, which includes felony cases from Cook County, Illinois, we find statistically significant between-judge variation in incarceration rates, although not in sentence lengths.

[b]The Luck of the Draw: Using Random Case Assignment to Investigate Attorney Ability[/b]
David S. Abrams and Albert H. Yoon
One of the most challenging problems in legal scholarship is the measurement of attorney ability. Measuring attorney ability presents inherent challenges because the nonrandom pairing of attorney and client in most cases makes it difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish between attorney ability and case selection. Las Vegas felony case data, provided by the Clark County Office of the Public Defender in Nevada, offer a unique opportunity to compare attorney performance. The office assigns its incoming felony cases randomly among its pool of attorneys, thereby creating a natural experiment free from selection bias. We find substantial heterogeneity in attorney performance that cannot be explained simply by differences in case characteristics, and this heterogeneity correlates with attorneys? individual observable characteristics. Attorneys with longer tenure in the office achieve better outcomes for the client. We find that a veteran public defender with ten years of experience reduces the average length of incarceration by 17 percent relative to a public defender in her first year. While we find no statistical difference based on law school attended or gender, we find evidence that the public defender?s race correlates with sentence length, with Hispanic attorneys obtaining sentences that were up to 26 percent shorter on average than those obtained by black or white attorneys. We also find evidence suggesting that differences in sentencing may be driven partly by different plea bargaining behavior on the part of the public defenders.

brendan:
ABC Radio National Law Report
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/lawreport/rss/lrt.xml

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