Twelve years before I commenced work on a ‘judicial biography’, the US jurist Richard Posner warned that in addition to ‘all the problems of general biography’ the writer of a such a biography also faces other ‘serious and seemingly inherent obstacles,’ including:

• the impossibility of reliably identifying the true source of an individual judge’s approach to the law;
• the extraordinary amount of time and high-level legal skills necessary for an adequate assessment of a judge’s judicial output, combined with the virtual impossibility of describing this in terms comprehensible to non-lawyers;
• the distortive effects of the mystification of the judicial process in the interests of casting an aura of legitimacy for judicial decision-making; and
• the collective nature of decision making by multi-member judicial panels, which makes it virtually impossible to identify an individual judge’s contribution.

Over the fifteen years of writing Sir Gerard Brennan: the Law’s Good Servant I encountered many such problems. However, I remained blissfully unaware of his conclusion that they made it virtually impossible to write a reliable judicial biography which was readable to non-lawyers. I hope to discuss those ‘obstacles’ and how I dealt with them.

Dr Jeff FitzGerald obtained an Honours degree in law from Melbourne University in 1965, after which he worked as a judge’s associate at the High Court of Australia. He obtained an LLM and a PhD in the sociology of law from Northwestern University, USA, then lectured in sociology and legal studies at La Trobe University, where was also the Dean of the School of Social Sciences (1978-81). He subsequently became Deputy Secretary in the Victorian Attorney General’s Department and the Registrar at the University of Technology Sydney, the Chancellor of which was Sir Gerard Brennan. Since retiring Jeff has acted as a consultant in the area of higher education governance and served as Chairman of the Board of Directors of the AustLII Foundation.