This is the full text of a speech given by Murray Gleeson, Chief Justice of the High Court of Australia, to the Judicial Conference of Australia, at Uluru.
Text of speech by Murray Gleeson, Chief Justice of the High Court.
A criticism that is sometimes made of institutions, and large organizations, public and private, is that they have lost their corporate memory. One consequence is waste of effort. A lot of time is spent addressing problems that have arisen, and been solved, before. And a sense of future direction can be difficult to maintain if people do not remember where they have come from. A particular danger to which some lawyers, including some judges, are exposed comes from their propensity to express their approval of a certain state of affairs by declaring it “essential” or “fundamental”. Sometimes this is a reasoned opinion. Sometimes it is mere rhetoric. Declarations of this kind are often made without adequate knowledge of what has gone on in the past, or, what goes on in other places. People may be surprised to learn that what they regard as an indispensable part of the natural order of things is, in truth, a recent development, or may be quite different from the way things are done, by respectable people, elsewhere. They may be alarmed by aspects of current practice which are not really new, but are simply a response to problems that have been around for a long time. A corporate memory can be a useful safeguard against this kind of error. It helps to fill in the context in which changes in the judiciary may be foreseen and evaluated.