To View a Century Downtown: Sydney University Law School's First
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CENTURY DOWN TOWN Sydney University Law School’s First Hundred Years Edited by John and Judy Mackinolty Sydney University Law School ® 1991 by the Sydney University Law School This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of study, research, criticism, review, or as otherwise permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be made to the publisher. Typeset, printed & bound by Southwood Press Pty Limited 80-92 Chapel Street, Marrickville, NSW For the publisher Sydney University Law School Phillip Street, Sydney ISBN 0 909777 22 5 Preface 1990 marks the Centenary of the Law School. Technically the Centenary of the Faculty of Law occurred in 1957, 100 years after the Faculty was formally established by the new University. In that sense, Sydney joins Melbourne as the two oldest law faculties in Australia. But, even less than the law itself, a law school is not just words on paper; it is people relating to each other, students and their teachers. Effectively the Faculty began its teaching existence in 1890. In that year the first full time Professor, Pitt Cobbett was appointed. Thus, and appropriately, the Law School celebrated its centenary in 1990, 33 years after the Faculty might have done. In addition to a formal structure, a law school needs a substantial one, stone, bricks and mortar in better architectural days, but if pressed to it, pre-stressed concrete. In its first century, as these chapters recount, the School was rather peripatetic — as if on circuit around Phillip Street. It had no fewer than six moves to different buildings, only the last of them purpose-built, in its first 80 years. And now we are planning a further move. The purpose built building turns out to be small. The teaching of combined degree students, in the first three years of their five year combined law degrees, by remote control at three kilometres distance, turns out to be an unsatisfactory procedure. But questions of location, of the style and size of buildings, of hopes for grandeur or at least comfort, of fears — which, given the last 30 years of university building in Australia are fully justified — of architectural squalor, all of these issues depend upon prior issues of the purpose and mission of a law school. One element of a successful institution is that it has due regard for its own history and traditions. In the case of the Law School of the University of Sydney, five features of that tradition, as described in these chapters, stand out. The first is the quality of its students over all, both as students and as shown in their subsequent careers. The second is the quality of the academic staff, measured both by the respect in which many of them are held as teachers, and by the impact of their scholarly work. The third is the substantial input made to the teaching programme over the years by dedicated part time teachers, including many judges and senior legal practitioners. The fourth is the strength of the courses in a wide range of fields, for example, contract, equity, torts, real property, constitutional and administrative law, company law, legal theory and international law. The fifth feature is a more recent one but by now well- established. The Faculty is the largest provider of postgraduate legal education, by coursework and research, in Australia. To these traditional strengths we have been seeking to add — for example, by interdisciplin ary work in particular fields. The Faculty includes staff with expertise in the economics of regulation, in criminology and criminal statistics, in the sociology of law. There are strong interests in such fields as technology and the law, international trade law, alternative dispute resolution, environmental law. 5 6 A Century Down Town What are the alternatives for the future? One possibility would be for the Faculy o narrow its foeus, to specialise more, and to concentrate more on postgraduate teaching aitfe expense of undergraduate teaching. In 1990 five universities offered undergraduate law dtgrtes within New South Wales and the Australian Capital Territory. That number will probaby double by the end of the decade. Despite this, and the temptation that might be felt to speciiliie in post graduate at the expense of undergraduate teaching, 1 believe that the Law SciO)l should maintain its position as a major undergraduate teaching institution. Postgraduate av teaching is important, and will become more important. But the makings of a lawyer, the beginnings of the many things that lawyers can be and do, are to be found in a broadly based urdegraduate program, and that should remain our major concern. The Law School must be sufficiently large to maintain its capacity to teach and to research in all the basic areas of Australian law, and of international public and private law so far as they impact on Australia. It nist be able to adapt to developing areas of the law. The combination of an understanding of basic areas of the law, and of the law in society, together with the intellectual flexibility to adapt tonew roles and to new demands, must be the hallmark of our graduates. The Law School needs to be substantial enough, in the depth of its staff and resources, to educate its students accordingly. One of the Law School’s most distinguished graduates is Sir Anthony Mason, Chief Justice of the High Court. In opening the Law School Centenary, he argued that: . if one’s vision of the lawyer is that he or she is something more than a legal technician, then the not onof a law faculty as an integral part of the University . seems irresistible . .Although theLaw School has always striven to produce graduates with a sense of professionalism, isolaion from the campus has meant that many students have not profited from the wider hprhons that life at the University has to offer. Closer integration with the University should enable us to build better bridgeheads between law and other disciplines. The absence of ;uch bridgeheads is a disturbing feature of Australian public and intellectual life. It makes lawyers vulnerable to the criticism that they are too inward-looking, that they do not understand, and are unwilling to appreciate, the benefits to be derived from other disciplines. That criticism, along with the criticism that the high cost of justice puts it beyond the reach o' the ordinary citizen, is very damaging to that respect for the law' which is the very foundation on which the Rule of Law rests. But he went on to warn that . in looking to wider horizons, the Law School must focus its primary attention on its respon sibility to educate professional lawyers and in that respect it is essential that the dose association between the Law School and the profession should continue unimpaired. There is thus a dual challenge facing the School, in planning and executing a move ‘back’ to the main campus of the University. That challenge is to maintain and reinforce our faditional strengths, while at the same time developing our teaching and research in areas such as access to law, the language of the law — in general, the adjustment of the law and its institutions to meet social needs. Facing that challenge, there is much to be learned — and some things to be amused by — in the account that follows of the Law School’s first hundred years. The Law School thanks all those who have contributed to the writing and production of this book. JAMES CRAWFORD Contents Preface James Crawford 5 Introduction John & Judy Mackinolty 9 1 Before the Beginning 1850-1890 John Mackinolty 13 2 Out of Nothing. 1890-1909 J.M. Bennett 29 3 Learned Practitioners 1910-1941 Judy Mackinolty 57 The Articled Clerk 1927-/932 — Myer Rosenblum 83 4 Interregnum 1942-1947 Judy Mackinolty 87 The Law School in Work! War / / — John M. Ward 97 5 The Law School Comforts Fund 1940-1946 Keith Jones 99 6 Law School People 1941-1973 W.L. Morison 105 Tart Time and Partisan — Justice Mary Gaudron 141 7 Present at the Creation — Criminology 1959- Gordon Hawkins 145 8 A Break With the Past 1974-1977 Bohdan Bilinsky 153 9 Entr’acte 1978-1979 R.B. Austin 163 10 Sharing Responsibility 1980-1985 O live W ood 171 11 Coping With Change 1984-1989 Richard J. Vann 185 Law School Enrolments 1890-1990 207 Law Graduates 1867-1990 211 Law School Teachers 259 Support Staff 263 Illustrations 266 Index 267 7 John Henry Challis 1893, marble by Archille Simonetti. University of Sydney Collection. The Chat lis bequest o f £250,000 to the University enabled the establishment o f the first Chair in law and four law lectureships. Introduction A Century Down Town in some ways follows on from The Jubilee Book o f the Law School published in 1940. We have followed our predecessor, Sir Thomas Bavin, by treating 1890 as the foundation date, although as Chapter 1 shows we could have picked on earlier dates if we had focused on the history of the Faculty, rather than the School. Likewise we have treated 1990 as our centenary rather than the apparently more correct 1989. This book does not follow on from the Jubilee Book in a chronological sense as we have started our period back at the foundations of the University, rather than take up the story in 1941. Apart from a desire to present an account of the Law School in one volume, we felt that some of the Jubilee Book contributors were too close to the events they recorded (doubtless our successors will feel the same way about some of our contributors).