Panel: New Terrains of Truth
Copanelists: Meg Jensen and Margaretta Jolly
In a country like Australia, where the tradition of judicial biography of superior court judges is sparse, the role of the biographer as translator of legal culture and shaper of judicial reputation is of great significance. In a broad sense, legal culture may be constructed as the amalgam and relationship between three key institutions and their mores: the legal academy, the legal profession, and the courts. In Australia, the role of the second in stimulating (the lack of) judicial biography has far outweighed the role of the other two.
Professions, such as the legal profession, may have an interest in remaining arcane, removed, and remote from the general community, but biography has an important role in the edification of the rarified role in “doing justice according to law.” Further, judicial biography has a role to play in both constructing and edifying the “personal dimension” of judging. This is particularly important in Australia, where the social role of judging is rarely discussed, and arguably not well understood, in public discourse.
This paper seeks to explore the way in which judicial biographers might serve as translators through the use of three case studies of former High Court judges, who are the subjects of existing biographies (although not necessarily “judicial biographies,” a subject which will also be addressed in the paper).
Katherine Lindsay MA LLB (Qld), LLM (Newc) is Senior Lecturer and Director of Curriculum in the Newcastle Law School, University of Newcastle, Australia. She has taught at the Newcastle Law School since its founding in 1993, in diverse areas including Legal System and Method, Human Rights Law, Equal Opportunity Law, and Child Law. Her primary area of teaching and research interest is Australian Federal Constitutional Law. She has published two works in this area: Australian Constitution in Context (1999) and Federal Constitutional Law (2003; 2nd ed. in press, 2008). It is the study of Constitutional Law in its context that has stimulated her research on Judicial Biography and the High Court of Australia, which is the topic of her current doctoral research.