The Principle of Open Justice and the Judicial Duty to Give Public Reasons

Abstract

This article explores the common law duty of courts to provide publicly available reasons for their decisions. The pre-modern position was that a failure to provide reasons did not constitute an error of law. However, the position in Australia has evolved such that the duty to provide reasons is now considered an 'incident of the judicial process' and has been recognised more recently as flowing from the principle of open justice. Against the backdrop of the emerging case law in Australia linking the duty to provide reasons with the open justice principle, this article considers when and how such a duty is to be exercised, what it might require in terms of public access to, and publication o..