The Hon Murray Gleeson - The Rule of Law and the Constitution

This is the text of the 2000 Boyer Lectures given by the Chief Justice on ABC radio, and thus to a generalist audience (published in book form); unsurprisingly, then, he didn't say anything at all controversial, and nothing in these lectures was particularly new to me, though I did find them to be a very lucid, readable summary (as well one might expect given their author!). More interesting was one of the appendices - the text of a speech that Gleeson gave to the Australian Bar Association Conference in 2000 (in New York, for some reason) on the nature of 'judicial legitimacy'. In that speech, he writes of judicial power as held on trust, on a fiduciary basis, and gets into the importance of impartiality and a 'legalistic' approach to statutory interpretation. There's also an amusing semi-digression regarding the inappropriateness of characterising judges or opinions in terms of heroism, bravery or creativity, leading to the serious point that "[t]he quality that sustains judicial legitimacy is not bravery or creativity, but fidelity [to] the terms of the trust upon which judges are invested with authority" (including the utilisation of accepted methods of legal methodology, etc)...I also liked this throwaway line: "Twilight does not invalidate the distinction between night and day; and Wednesbury unreasonableness does not invalidate the difference between merits review and judicial review of administrative action."