Judging and Justice: The Sir Frank Kitto Lecture, 2004

The University of New England is the university most associated with the distinguished Australian judge, Sir Frank Kitto. He was first its Deputy Chancellor and then its Vice-Chancellor from 1968 to 1981. In fact, Kitto had a long association with academia during the course of his career. Early on, he graduated not only in Law but in Greek and Latin, he was Challis lecturer for a while at Sydney University, and he co-wrote, with J.H. Hammond, a work on Landlord and Tenant law, and provided a digest of statute law cases for New South Wales. But his career is marked by his insistence throughout of a particular approach to the judicial process and the workings of the law. He constantly referred to his own approach to the vexed and difficult question of what the best judicial reasoning should be. This is unusual. There are many good judges, as one would hope, but not all judges are able to express a clear philosophical account of what they actually do; Sir Frank could do this and he did it on several occasions.