Rescheduled to 2026 – Date TBC
Darren Bracken has been practising at the Victorian Bar for some years. His practice remains broad covering such areas as common law claims, what is often described as personal injuries litigation, public administrative law, technology and media law, property and commercial law, wills and probate and commissions and disciplinary bodies. Darren’s practice is balanced; he acts for both plaintiffs and defendants including institutional defendants. Darren’s practice has taken him overseas to Nauru and Sierra Leone.
Between 2018 and 2023 Darren sat as a Coroner at the Victorian Coroners’ Court and dealt with a wide range of investigations and inquests including those arising from the Essendon Airport aircraft crash in 2017, various complex medical issues and fires that had environmental impact. Shortly after leaving the court and returning to the Victorian Bar Darren completed a Masters’ Degree in Bioethics at Monash University. Darren is a member of a number of Human Research Ethics Committees dealing with, amongst other things, applications by pharmaceutical companies for approval of research including clinical trials.
During 2014 -2015 Darren sat as a Residential Magistrate in Nauru and dealt with criminal charges filed against a large number of men who had arrived in Australia seeking asylum and had been transported to Nauru. Most of whom did not speak English. The prosecution was conducted by lawyers from New South Wales and the defence by a changing cohort of Victorian Barristers. Darren will tell us about; the challenges of living and working in Nauru in 2014-15 and the extraordinary circumstances surrounding the cases he dealt with, something of Nauru’s complex and somewhat fraught history and its legal system, the controversial and unprecedented conduct of the Nauruan Government cancelling the then (2014) Chief Justice of Nauru, and previous Justice of Appeal in Victoria the Honourable G.M. Eames’, Nauruan visa preventing his Honour from returning to Nauru to deal with a case involving the deportation of Nauruan Residential Magistrate Mr Peter Law.
‘Practising Law in the Pacific’
Location: General Meeting to be held at the Alexandra Club.
Date: TBC
Time: 6.30 pm – 11.30 pm
Dress: Black tie