Justice Virginia Bell, a CLC lawyer …

It is now notorious that the most recent appointment to the High Court, Justice Virginia Bell, once worked as a solicitor at Redfern Legal Centre in Sydney. Many, including Justice Bell at her swearing in, have remarked that it is a long way from Redfern to the High Court. In at least one very important way, I don’t think it is. To the contrary, Bell’s appointment shows us a close connection between the two institutions. [It is appropriate I think, but it feels odd, for me to refer to Her Honour as ‘Bell’ and not as ‘Virginia’, or ‘VB’. She is a friend, with whom I worked at Redfern Legal Centre, as a volunteer when she was a solicitor there, and as a solicitor when she was on the management committee.]

The distance between Redfern and the High Court is much more than 300 km. The austere concrete and wooden panelled spaces of the High Court could not be further from the cramped and shabby warren of rooms, corridors and staircases in Redfern Town Hall. The subsequent ‘heritage’ refurbishment hasn’t brought the inner-city Town Hall much closer to the lakeside tower of the High Court. But the claims of distance between the two are not made for mileage or appearance or for other obvious contrasts such as resources, ceremony, and reputation – as much as for a sense of what the two places are about: could the business of the High Court be any more removed from the business of Redfern Legal Centre? Could the lawyers working there being any more different? Well, yes, actually. Here’s why.

I had dropped out of my law degree and returned to it. Somehow I found myself joining the student volunteer roster at Redfern Legal Centre. The initial appeal was that it was hugely exciting – the place buzzed. Community legal centres were new entities, outriders in the legal system. Many of the same people who started the centres were members of organisations such as the Australian Legal Workers Group, the Feminist Legal Action Group, the Prisoners Action Group, and Women behind Bars; they defended the Gay Mardi Gras campaigners and established a prisoners’ legal service, they campaigned for drug reform and against police verbals. And they were there, on duty day and night, for local people in trouble or need.

Suddenly law was a palpable presence for me: I saw law’s power as an active force in people’s lives, at times a burden and at times a solution, threatening livelihood and liberty, and offering protection and security. I saw too those who dealt with the law’s power: lawyers who knew how law worked, who could grab it from the shelves, draw it down from their experience, explain it, shape it and use it.

The Centre’s lawyers would write the law down and talk it up, throw it around in police stations and tease it out in court, reflect on it late into the night and pore over it in the early hours of the morning. I learnt not only the existential interdependence of law and society, but also the lawyer’s central role in mediating this relationship. Now that, for me, is not far at all from the business of the High Court.

Bell was one of those lawyers. Her clients were in gaol or on bail or on parole or at the police station or in the dock. They were poor or unwell or homeless or junkies or oppressed or vilified. Commentators see the relevance of this experience to Bell’s High Court appointment in, they rightly assume, an empathy for those whom – we were told at the swearing in – Herbert Vere Evatt called ‘the little people’. That might be right, but we’ll have to see what that means in practice on the High Court bench. More importantly than whom Bell acted for was the way that she did it. She was smart, sharp, quick, and completely committed to getting the best result for her clients.

If evidence is needed of Bell’s formidable reputation while at Redfern Legal Centre, it is in the lyrics of ‘Police Verbals’ by Sydney punk band Mutant Death, who sang (if that’s not too generous a term): ‘I was being verballed, I was being bashed / And the law couldn’t help ‘cause I didn’t have the cash / I woke up next morning, still bleeding in my cell / Got on to Redfern Legal Centre, spoke to Virginia Bell’.

I learnt from Bell, and the other lawyers, that to be a good legal centre lawyer, you need to be a very good lawyer. Resources are limited and the opponents are well resourced, time is tight, the clients are needy, the law is complex and the stakes are high. The clients rarely have more going for them than a committed lawyer and a novel legal strategy. A good legal centre lawyer has to know the law, understand its policy, overcome its limitations and exploit its possibilities.

Bell was not alone in her legal ability at Redfern Legal Centre; her contemporaries – who taught and mentored and inspired me – and many legal centre lawyers since, have gone on to similarly high office: judges, magistrates, senior barristers and bureaucrats, law deans, law reform chairs, law firm partners.

A good legal centre lawyer is a very good lawyer indeed. High Court material, in fact.

First published as ‘A Reflection on Justice Virginia Bell’ in Peppercorn, Issue 1, Feb 2009, ANU Students Law Society, ANU College of Law.