Swearing-in of the Hon Justice Peter Lyons

The fact that we have standing room only here this morning shows that the Bar wholeheartedly welcomes this appointment and it is a privilege to extend our congratulations and best wishes to your Honour.

The Bar Association received yeoman’s service from your Honour. You served for a total of 11 years on the Bar Council including 2 terms as Vice President and one as its leader.  Those of us lucky enough to have observed your work there remember a firm hand clad in a velvet glove which was always guided by what you thought was fair.

Your history is one of persistent interest in and practical involvement with ethical concerns — the Bar’s professional conduct committee, the Mater Hospital’s Research Ethics Committee and recently your membership of the Practitioners’ Panel for the Legal Practice Tribunal.

On behalf of the Bar I sincerely thank you for so many years of valuable service to the profession.

As a man who has 4 sons, who is one of 5 brothers who had a father possessed of a powerful personality where most of these were lawyers, your Honour could be forgiven for being a little one-sided.  You aren’t and this is likely to be due almost entirely to three decades’ exposure to the ameliorating influence of the Senior Justice Lyons (self-evidently I use the term strictly in connection with judicial seniority). 

One example of your Honour’s well-rounded nature is the love of languages mentioned by the Attorney-General. In addition to English which you have acquired a working knowledge of during your 30 years practice as a barrister, I understand that you are fluent in Italian and, that if you are not yet fluent in French, this is not far off.  Given your association with the Augustinian Friars there is little prospect that, at the least, your Latin is also very tidy.  So your Honour’s appointment seems to have raised the qualification to the claim to be the Court’s true polyglot. Competition on the bench is a healthy thing and we look forward to another gentleman, who was schooled at Villanova College, taking up Spanish, Hindi or Mandarin in order to reclaim this title.

As a barrister you gained a reputation as a tireless worker who prepared his cases meticulously and brought to bear on them a keen intellect, a good knowledge of legal principle and a high regard for the legal process and its capacity to produce a just outcome.

Three of your Honour’s former juniors claim that few, if any, trials were conducted that did not include a tranche of email requests to them and your instructing solicitors often commencing as early as, and sometimes before, 3.00am; That in the course of preparation, every pebble, stone, rock and boulder was dislodged, turned, carefully inspected and ultimately crushed.  It sounds as though you appeared in a lot of quarry cases together.  They also claim that your usual responses to seemingly “clever” points raised by them were; “Why do you say that?” or “I don’t follow” and that by this you conveyed both genuine interest and mild disdain. An ability to convey these things simultaneously is surely a quality which will stand you in good stead in your new role.

Juniors are one thing but their compliments are susceptible to scepticism. Other leaders who for many years have been your colleagues and competitors in the planning and environment jurisdiction, however, have nothing to lose from a frank assessment.  The cynical response is that this group would simply exult at the prospect of all of your Honour’s briefs flooding back onto the market.  Instead the standard response from crafty, crusty warhorses such as Gallagher QC, Gore QC, and Gibson QC was a profession of genuine regret that such an honourable and worthy opponent was to be taken from them.  I believe I even detected something close to a tear in a few cases.  The sensible approach must be to wait until after your Honour’s briefs have been distributed before attempting a reliable assessment of whether these were genuine or merely crocodile tears but regardless of the outcome of this analysis it is unlikely that there can be a better professional recommendation than that this group, whose members have worked so closely with you in this specialist jurisdiction, regard you with such fondness and respect.

Your Honour and your family, including Justice Lyons  and our colleague James are entitled to savour this occasion. The Bar shares in your enjoyment, applauds your appointment to the Court and warmly congratulates you.