Judicial Biography in Australia: Current Obstacles and Opportunities

Abstract

Judicial biography – or the scarcity of it – is a matter of ongoing complaint in legal and academic circles in Australia. Judicial biography has been variously described as ‘an undeveloped branch of scholarship in Australia’, ‘as rare as hen’s teeth’, ‘small and undistinguished’, having ‘received little academic attention’, subsisting within the ‘wider malaise ... afflict[ing] the study of Australian legal history’, and, rather damningly, as an area of scholarship in ‘parlous condition.’ Supreme Court judges, or judges of the colonial era, seem to have fared somewhat better than their High Court and Federal Court counterparts in having their intellectual portraits sketched by biographers,..