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Fascinating judgment.

I can't help wondering if the floodgates on appeal from findings of fact may be creaking open in several categories:
- the potential for rebranding findings of fact as exercises of discretion and playing games with that;
- the potential for equating (a) a judge's failure to note in writing a possible question and answer that might or might not be asked regarding a particular piece of evidence; with (b) a judge's failure properly to direct herself to asking and answering the same question. I certainly concede this is an unfair characterisation and clumsily expressed, but that's what jumped into my mind at first gbluch and I hope we're not conflating post hoc absence of evidence (of a particular judicial thinking) with evidence of absence? Drafting judgments must be sufficiently exhausting already, without being expected to gold-plate by second-guessing every possible view of the evidence at, of all things, appeal...

Looking on the bright side, I suppose such appellate possibilities might ameliorate the recent unnerving adjustment from Ghosh to Ivey, with the latter's potential for implacable cruelty to disabled or other vulnerable defendants...

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