Revarnishing a reputation takes more than publishing a learned tome on contracts ($250) and being invited to speechify at the Guild of Noble Bench Stackers.
Despite the attempts at polishing, the rude fishwraps still refer to Dyson Heydon as the “disgraced former High Court judge” and regularly remind readers that he was the subject of an official investigation into his prelapsarian seduction techniques.
The exception is anything written by the Perfumed Planet, who is still enraptured by the great man.
The Commonwealth paid large settlements to three of his former associates. He handed in his gong and the whole gruesome episode reminded everyone of the need for a Commonwealth Judicial Commission.
He might have considered the path to rehabilitation taken by John Profumo, the UK Secretary of State for War, who was disgraced over a Cold War dalliance with Christine Keeler, a showgirl who was also dallying with Yevgeny Ivanov, a Russian KGB officer at the USSR Embassy.
Profumo spent the next 40 years washing dishes, cleaning toilets and fundraising at Toynbee Hall, a charitable institution in Spitalfields to assist the poor.
Why Dicey didn’t take heed and volunteer to make beds and serve meals for the homeless at the Matthew Talbot Hostel is one of the great shames.
Instead, Dicey set Justice Jackboots Jackman on a crusade for speedy judgments.
The groundwork was laid by the High Court decision in Aon Risk Services v ANU, where Dice went to town on a “deplorable” delay by the primary judge – in excess of 10 months.
He claimed the authorities in England and here regarded 10 months as “an excessive period of reservation, even for the most complex of trials and appeals”.
“… the delay in giving judgment in this case is alien to every axiom of modern litigation.”
He ended famously with:
“The torpid languor of one hand washes the drowsy procrastination of the other. Are these phenomena indications of something chronic in the modern state of litigation? Or are they merely acute and atypical breakdowns in an otherwise functional system? Are they signs of a trend, or do they reveal only an anomaly? One hopes for one set of answers. One fears that, in reality, there must be another.”
It looks like the culprit was Justice Malcolm Gray of the ACT Supremes (previously Solicitor General for South Australia).
The baton was passed to the eager disciple, young Jackboots, who ran with it in the Kathleen Farrell fiasco, in a special outburst with The Australian, in Microsoft Corporation v CPL Notting Hill, and most recently in the appropriately named Speed lecture.
When you’re on a good thing, stick with it.
Now word reaches me that, having been a guest speaker at the Guild of Noble Bench Stackers, Dice is set to write a biography of Samuel Griffith.
Since his collision with the #MeToo movement, the legacy publishing houses have cancelled him, so this may be another venture from “Sumner Publications” … an unlikely pathway to redemption.