May it please the Court.
The Bar wholeheartedly welcomes this appointment, and I take great pleasure in extending congratulations and best wishes to your Honour.
The appellate division of the Supreme Court sits at the apex of our system of administration of justice in this state. Before your Honour’s appointment this body had already earned a fine reputation. For the reasons I will come to I expect your Honour to add a further gleam to its lustre.
Your Honour is blessed with a high degree of formal intelligence. This combined with an extensive knowledge of legal principle, wide and long experience of the legal process in operation, an intimidating capacity for hard work and the transforming knack of being able to reduce the complex to the simple alone may be thought by some to qualify your Honour for this new position.
However, society appropriately now demands that organs of the state’s civic structure as important as the Supreme Court and its appellate division cater for the diversity found in the wider community. Superficially some may think that your Honour fails to satisfy this demand. That impression may be reinforced by your Honour’s sterling pedigree described by the Attorney-General. On the basis of this a case could be made that your Honour was always going to be a barrister and then a judge.
All of this might incline some to conclude that your Honour is an example of a club elevating one of their own. Assuming that such a club exists and wields such influence, there are a number of reasons for submitting that your Honour is not a member.
I should confess now that despite knowing your Honour for more than 40 years, I had never thought of your Honour as a strawberry. The clan Fraser’s crest includes the words “On a mount in a flourish of strawberries, leaved and fructed proper.” The editors of Collins Encyclopaedia of Scotland interpret this as “a strawberry plant growing out of a dung heap”. Whether this can be sustained is one thing but the message is clear. The members of the clan can be expected to be, can I say, properly developed or well rounded.
Coming into the world on Bastille day 1957 I suppose it was theoretically possible that your Honour would qualify for this high office by living the life of a flamboyantly, colourful revolutionary. This however, was not to be the path your Honour took. After a brief and, if I may say so with the utmost respect, a spectacularly unsuccessful flirtation in the late 80’s with high male fashion, your Honour has instead chosen to mask your talents in the traditional charcoal grey pinstripe of modesty and dedication to matters of substance.
An example of this modesty is your Honour’s entry in last years who’s who. It is a model of economy which begrudgingly gives up the bare minimum necessary to convey that at the time your Honour was alive and qualified to hold a practicing certificate.
I missed the ceremony, but I am told that, at his Honour’s swearing in, Justice Keane extolled the virtues of the impact of life within a family which has completely different interests and which employs a healthy scepticism in respect of one’s views. Your Honour has enjoyed this advantage.
In a family of 5 children all of whom were prone to value their own opinions highly and air them with corresponding frequency and vigour your Honour survived to manhood without any of the needy indecisiveness sometimes found in middle children.
Now for many years your Honour has lived with your wife and children. The children are accomplished and unconventional; Lucy a fine scholar with an interest in Japanese, Henry who is currently holidaying with orang-outangs in Laos is a mathematician and Douglas an explorer. The interests of Margie to whom your Honour seems to have been married for ever span art architecture design and fashion. Again all of those close to you have kept your Honour close to the mark at all times.
Your Honour’s practice for 28 years has truly spanned the spectrum of work barristers are called on to perform.
These experiences I submit have given your Honour the most well rounded of preparations for the challenges now to be faced.
I suspect that the Government through the Attorney-General has detected this. While on this topic I would like to express the Association’s appreciation for the manner in which it has been consulted about appointments such as Justice Frasers’.
Occasions such as this morning generate mixed feelings for the members of the Bar. Your Honour was a commanding advocate who never once as far as I can tell deviated from the courteous road taken by good exponents of this trade. The Bar has lost its leader. On the other hand it has gained a new judge of whom, it and the community can expect much. On balance it is a good bargain.
On behalf of its members including its council I thank your Honour especially for the selfless service that you have given the Bar Association. Although your term as President was cut short, the effort you lavished on the promotion of its affairs and the light touch and wise resolutions your Honour brought to some difficult issues will be remembered.
Being new to this role, I have only just discovered that the person who gives this address is traditionally subjected to pressure to unearth titbits which tend to embarrass the new judge (no doubt only mildly). The search has proved fruitless. Even keepers of the Bar’s secrets such as Justice Martin have been stumped. In any event, as there is no appeal to the High Court from your Honour’s response to what I say, I cannot see the benefit to me of this approach. Consequently even if I had unearthed evidence of your Honour’s advanced addiction to junk food which resulted in the award of a prize at the RNA Show for a composition explaining “Why Freddo Frogs are superior” I would not have mentioned it. Perhaps such talent may be turned to judgment writing.
Someone who knows your Honour well, tells me that one of your Honour’s defining characteristics is that you are exceedingly kind to young children. Given that this new role will involve dealing with senior counsel, junior counsel and the self represented, this may just prove to be your Honour’s most valuable professional attribute.
Your Honour and your family are entitled to savour this occasion. The Bar shares in your enjoyment and in this recognition of this new and most important milestone in your legal career. We wish you very well in this new role.
May it please the court.
Michael Stewart SC
President
