News & Events

This week

On Monday morning, I was in Canberra for the Hon. Chief Justice Susan Kiefel’s farewell ceremony at the High Court of Australia. Her Honour was the third woman to be appointed to the Court. She served for 10 years before being appointed the first female Chief Justice of the High Court. As you can see from the transcript, the ceremony was very well attended. As is common at these events, a full 5 minutes before the judges came onto the bench, a tipstaff asked those present to ensure that their mobile phones were switched off. From that moment until the judges took their seats, no one said a word. There must have been 200 people in the Court, and there was complete silence. There are very few secular places where 200 people would sit in silence for so long. That fact is reflective of the revered position our apex Court holds in our system of justice and, more generally, in Australian society. On behalf of the Bar, I thank her Honour for her long and distinguished service on our nation’s most important Court. 

This week

On Monday morning, I spoke on behalf of the Bar at the Hon. Justice Ian Waller’s welcome in the Banco Court of the Supreme Court of Victoria. His Honour was admitted to practice in April of 1988 and signed the Bar Roll just 12 months later. He read with Julian Burnside AO KC. His Honour took silk in 2007 and served for many years on the Board of Examiners and (more recently) on the Ethics Committee. I am proud to count myself among his Honour’s six Readers. In his reply, his Honour referred to his family’s connection to the law, and to all the momentous occasions they had enjoyed in the Banco Court. He observed that none of those occasions would have occurred if his father’s parents had not left Poland in 1938 to avoid the worst consequences of the twisted and hateful ideology embodied in the Nazi regime. It was a poignant speech that made everyone present pause and reflect.

Last Saturday was a very good day. We held the 2023 Sports Law Conference and Tri-State Football Tournament at Green Gully FC. It started off with several interesting sports-related papers, and then teams from three states took to the field for a series of matches.

The Victorian Bar is an enduring and venerable institution, and one that we should all feel very proud to belong to. While we are a voluntary association of independent professionals, we can, through our Bar, make a significant collective contribution to the administration of justice. Our unique professional status and college ought be our strength and usually it is. Unfortunately, below I address a recent example of behaviour by one of our number which falls below the professional standards expected of all barristers and which undermines the collegiate atmosphere we all enjoy around chambers.