Top international judges visit ANU

The ANU College of Law hosted a lunch in the Hall at University House on Thursday 4 June 2009 that saw an extraordinary gathering of senior national and international judicial figures.

The occasion that led to the lunch was a visit to Australia, for the Indo-Australian Legal Forum 2009, of judges from the Supreme Court of India, including Chief Justice KG Balakrishnan and Justices SB Sinha and SH Kapadia, as well as the Additional Solicitor-General of India Mr G Subramanium.

The judges expressed interest in meeting Australia’s leading legal scholars and therefore wanted to visit ANU. So they took time out from the forum to attend a lunch hosted by Professor Michael Coper, Dean of the ANU College of Law.

The Indian judges were accompanied by an array of Australia’s leading judges — six of the seven Justices of the High Court of Australia, including Chief Justice Robert French and Justices William Gummow, Ken Hayne, Dyson Heydon, Susan Crennan, and Virginia Bell, as well as Chief Justice Michael Black of the Federal Court of Australia, Chief Justice James Spigelman of the Supreme Court of New South Wales, and Chief Justice Marilyn Warren of the Supreme Court of Victoria — and the Solicitor-General of Australia, Mr Stephen Gageler, a distinguished alumnus of ANU.

Professor Coper welcomed the guests and noted his own Indian connections, including his time as Myer Foundation Asian and Pacific Fellow at the University of Rajasthan in Jaipur in 1970.

 He noted that, although Australia’s relationship with China, especially in trade matters, seemed to receive more prominence than its relationship with India, Australia and India had so much in common — a federal system with judicial review, a shared British colonial heritage, and English as a major means of communication — that prospects for future relations were outstanding.

Professor Coper was part of a legal delegation to India in 2004 that resulted in the recognition of the law degrees of six Australian universities, including ANU, for the purpose of admission to practice in India, and next month the Council of Australian Law Deans would be hosting a visit to Australia of the Bar Council of India.