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Welcome to my home page. This allows me to speak directly to you. Until now, I have mainly had to speak through the forbidding pages of court reports and formal legal texts. Of course this has not stopped me in the past from speaking directly. Basically, I always try to write in the same way as I speak. My career has included work as a judge in two great Australian appellate courts - the High Court of Australia and the Court of Appeal of New South Wales. This website helps you to find:
- My judicial opinions in the courts on which I have served;
- My speeches, articles, book reviews and other 'pearls of wisdom';
- For the first time, this website has my speeches back to 1975, the year I helped set up the Australian Law Reform Commission (ALRC). Virtually all of the speeches are here. In fact, I lay claim to inventing the 'blog'. Follow my speeches and you can track my activities, experiences, thinking and feelings over 34 years of public life in Australia and abroad;
- My multimedia gallery provides photos and films of my work and home life;
- The website will offer filmed and recorded excerpts from speeches old and new as well as podcasts that can be downloaded.
Everyone who visits this space has a right to agree or disagree with what they find. Causing occasional offence is not the greatest sin. Being boring, self-righteous or unkind compete for that award. I welcome feedback and suggestions as I embrace new adventures in my life. These may take me into arbitration and mediation; academic teaching and research; new international activities; and work completely outside the "Great Game" of the law. |
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Australian Jurist Michael Kirby Named Co-Winner of Gruber Justice Prize
NEW YORK, WEDNESDAY
Michael Kirby, retired judge of the High Court of Australia, was today
named as the co-winner of the Gruber Justice Prize for 2010. The
announcement was made in New York by the Gruber Foundation, a
philanthropic organisation that awards the Gruber Prizes annually.
Michael Kirby is the first Australian to win the Gruber Justice Prize,
although other Australians have previously been named as winners of
Gruber Prizes in the field of science. These have included Professor
Elizabeth Blackburn who won the Gruber Prize for Genetics in 2006 and
who was named in 2009 as co-winner of the Nobel Prize for
Psychology/Medicine for her discovery of telemerase. Professor
Blackburn is one of a number of Gruber Prize winners who have later gone
on to be awarded the Nobel Prize. There is no Nobel Prize for Law or
Justice.
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Attorney-General, The Hon Robert McClelland MP; President of the Australian Bar Association, Mr Thomas Bathurst, QC; President of the Law Council of Australia, Mr John Corcoran; President of my home Bar, the Bar Association of New South Wales, Ms Anna Katzmann SC;The Hon T E F Hughes, AO, QC; Judicial, Academic and other Colleagues; Family and Friends:
In this room, where independent judges uphold the law and the Constitution, I start by honouring the people of Australia, in all of their diversity, most of them happily unaware of what we do here today. Fortunate is a land that lives in confidence under the rule of law, with elected parliaments, uncorrupted officials and independent judges.
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