Gabrielle Appleby

Nicholas Petrie and Julian R Murphy’s recently released edited collection, Public Law and Criminal Law in Australia: Overlap, Intersection and Inconsistency (Federation Press, 2025) invites us to consider the relationship between ‘public law’ and ‘criminal law’—whether that is in terms of overlap, intersection or inconsistency. In doing so, the volume both provides important consideration of these issues in the Australian context, as well as lays an excellent foundation for a rich vein of future scholarship.

Nicholas Petrie and Julian R Murphy

The thing we most wanted to achieve in collecting a series of chapters on Australian criminal law and public law was to start a conversation, or many conversations really. We wanted to start conversations between the practitioners and academics in these two areas of law that have traditionally been practiced and studied separately. We also wanted to start a conversation between the bodies of law themselves – to draw attention to the points at which legal principles in each of these areas overlap, intersect and are in tension. We thought we had gone a good way to achieving this in the book itself, which is comprised of chapters by academics, practitioners and statutory office holders spread across the field of criminal and public law.