ABSTRACT
In order to establish the liability of a party to an action or, indeed, to establish one’s defence to an action, it may be necessary to request relevant documentation from the opposing party. By the same token, the party holding that documentation may well not wish to comply with a request for its release if the contents impact badly upon them. The legal process by which a party to an action might compel the production of documentation or the answering of questions (‘interrogatories’) is known as ‘discovery’. Issues of discovery need to be settled, so far as possible, prior to the trial of the main action and so may form part of pre-trial or ‘interlocutory’ proceedings (though they may also be raised in the trial itself). This chapter deals with a means by which applications for the discovery of documents may be resisted by the making of a claim of public interest immunity.
