Graduations

Graduation address given by the Hon J J Spigelman AC

The Hon J J Spigelman AC, Chief Justice of NSW and recipient of the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws, gave the following occasional address at the Faculty of Law graduation ceremony held on 28 May 2004.

Graduation address

I grew up in a country in which the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Menzies, was able to travel to England for six weeks by boat with the Australian cricket team, stay for a month or so watching cricket and then return, taking another six weeks to do so. Things have speeded up since then.

Another feature of the era was the dial on radio sets, still then called by many people a wireless, even though it then wasn’t. Such sets were universally manufactured not with the radio frequency spectrum but with the call signs printed on the dial, e.g. 2GB, 2UE etc. The idea that additional radio stations may be permitted to exist had not crossed anyone’s mind and was not do so for decades.

I hold the belief, which many of you probably regard as illusory, that all of this was not that long ago. The technological changes over this period have been extraordinary and are continuing. For many years, all aspects of Australian life was dominated by what was aptly described as the tyranny of distance. There was no aspect of life more significantly burdened by that tyranny than intellectual life. For those of us who had the privilege of attending and graduating from this great University, the transformation wrought by technology in the accessibility of information and the ability to travel and receive visitors has transformed the university experience, as so much else.

In some respects we have substituted the tyranny of distance with the tyranny of immediacy. This tyranny, at least, we share with everyone else.

All aspects of life have speeded up. Olympic sports like luge, cycling and canoeing are now measured in milliseconds. Other sports have changed their rules or reinvented themselves to provide a “fast-food” alternative. One thinks of the introduction of tie breakers in tennis. Sir Robert Menzies would never have approved of one-day cricket.

Anyone using contemporary telecommunications or computer technology has experienced a curious phenomenon: a sense that a particular delay in some processing functions was quite intolerable, even though that length of delay was perfectly acceptable, indeed regarded as miraculous, only a year before.

Where we once spoke of words per minute, we now speak of characters per second. One can buy telephone answering machines with a quick replay button - in a digital format, so that the replay is accelerated without the high pitch of a Disneyfied chipmunk. In Tokyo there is a restaurant which charges by time. You clock in, you clock out and your bill is computed at a certain number of yen per minute. Indeed it is necessary for us to create the illusion that we are saving time, even when we cannot do so. On most elevators, the “door close” button is in fact a placebo. It has no function other than to placate those who measure their life in seconds.

Sometimes our technology proves constraining. The original typewriters were mechanical. A fast typist would cause the metal typefaces to lock together. Accordingly, a keyboard was invented to slow down the pace of typing in the English language, by positioning the letters in a deliberately inconvenient manner. This is called the QWERTY keyboard, after the top left hand line of letters. It remains the standard upon which everyone has learned to type, even though it is deliberately inefficient.

I give another example concerning the booster rockets on the side of the United States space shuttle, which must be shipped by train from the factory to the launch site. Those booster rockets cannot be made any bigger because they have to fit through a single track railway tunnel in the Rocky Mountains.

The United States railway gauge, which is four feet eight and a half inches, or 1.435 metres, was adopted because that was the gauge in the pioneer industrial economy, England. The first railway lines in England had been built by the same engineers who built the pre-railway tramways and that was the gauge that they had used. The reason they adopted that gauge was because they used the same jigs, tools and equipment that had long been used to build wagons and carriages, drawn by horses. The wagons and carriages were built with four feet eight and a half inches between the wheels because that was the space between the ruts in the road for many of the long distance roads in England. By continued use over the centuries, those ruts had become fixed by the passage of countless wagons and carriages and the most efficient way to traverse the road was to stay in the ruts.

Many of the long distance roads in England had been laid down by the Romans and the ruts had commenced to be formed during the period of Roman occupation of England by the wheels of Roman chariots. All chariots throughout the Roman empire were built, in the interests of standardisation, with a distance between the wheels of four feet eight and a half inches. That distance was originally chosen because it was the approximate width of the backside of two horses.

Accordingly, the reason why the space shuttle is, and will remain, of limited capacity, is because its booster rockets cannot be much bigger than the width of two horses’ behinds.

The success stories of contemporary technology are, of course, more widespread than these little difficulties would suggest. Every academic discipline and profession, not least the practice of law, has been transformed over recent decades by information and communication technology. Electronic communication and the accessibility of legal information on-line is the most dramatic technical improvement in my legal lifetime. It has transformed the way legal work is conducted.

There was a time, only twenty years ago, when I tried to keep up-to-date with overseas developments by subscribing to a sea mail edition of the Sunday New York Times. It has been estimated that the amount of information contained in one issue of the Sunday New York Times would approximately equate to the total amount of information that a citizen of the nineteenth century would acquire in a lifetime. The papers would stack up metres high at home waiting for me to get around to reading them. That this, and much more, is instantly available, with a few clicks of a mouse, is simultaneously amazing and daunting.

What one can now gather, almost instantly, through the power of search engines and the omnipresence of mass media in profusion, requires a self-consciously determined process of selection, otherwise mere chance will determine what we learn and what we do. How can one cope with the flow and stay in control of one’s own intellectual development?

The scale of the problem can be represented by one figure. If you search the words “information overload” on Google, as I did yesterday, you get 768,000 hits. That has a certain self-satirical quality. It does, however, reflect the broader problem, which has been called “data asphyxiation”.

On this occasion, I thought I might tell you how I have come to deal with the burden of information overload. It is not a coping mechanism that will suit everyone, but some of you may find it useful. A maxim I have found compelling is: Live as if you will die tomorrow, but read as if you will live forever. An insight that I have found useful in my own journey is that if you try to learn too much, you may end up learning nothing.

I decided long ago that if I kept reading as widely as I had been and in an unsystematic fashion, I would acquire a lot of information in the short-term, but the depth of my understanding of anything would not improve. For those of you who will become barristers, you will learn that it is essential to the craft that you cram your mind with an enormous amount of information about the subject matter of the proceedings and instantly download the whole of that database as soon as you come out of court. Unfortunately, this process becomes so ingrained, that you find that you instinctively download a lot of things you would have preferred to retain.

My technique for adapting to the pressures of information overload was to choose one area of intellectual inquiry about which I could read in-depth, preferably an area not directly connected to my daily activities.

I first chose the history of western Shanghai. This was the early eighties when China was still a totalitarian State and the possibility of the extraordinary change in the People’s Republic and the re-emergence of Shanghai as a major international city was not within the realms of contemplation. After several years that project ceased, when I realised that I really couldn’t do it properly unless I taught myself how to read Chinese. That, at the time, seemed a daunting project albeit, in retrospect, I wish I had had the courage to proceed.

The substitute was far removed in time and place. I read in depth into medieval history, concentrating on the life of Thomas Becket. This was a subject on which I was tolerably confident that there were no new documents to be discovered. My schoolboy Latin was probably enough. Becket had attracted a large, but finite and apparently manageable body of historical writing.

This became my intellectual hobby. It was a disciplined way of organising my ignorance. It had a point, a purpose and a finite end. Instead of acquiring a glib understanding on a wide variety of subjects I could come to understand a particular subject in-depth and eventually, perhaps, write about it. My overseas travel acquired a purpose. There were places to be visited, such as Canterbury itself. In those pre-Amazon days books had to be discovered, often by chance, in second hand bookshops. I recall well the thrill of finding a definitive biography in a Paris bookshop of the contemporary french king, Louis VII. I did not experience anything like the same sensation when, in order to check whether this was still the definitive biography in french, I conducted a thirty second check on Amazon France, to find that it was.

Most enjoyable was the time I spent in libraries throughout the world, particularly in London, Sydney and Washington. Most significant of all was the magnificent resource which, as a graduate, I had access to in the Fisher Library of this University. The greatest number of entries in my bibliography were found here.

Eventually I was able to organise this research in the form of a draft during a sabbatical I gave myself from the Sydney bar in 1992. Nothing more was done until 1999, when I was asked by John McCarthy QC, a Fellow of the Senate, to address the St Thomas More Society, of which he is President.

Over the course of the last five years this little obsession has transformed itself into a series of lectures to the Society on the life and death of Thomas Becket and his relationship with Henry II. It has been a wonderful journey but, in the last lecture late last year, I finally killed Becket. The lectures will be published next week by the Society as a book and this journey is over.

I am now actively looking for another hobby.

My ability to continue to grow intellectually was determined by the eight wonderful years that I spent as an undergraduate in this University. I remember those years with the greatest fondness. It is for that reason that the particular honour bestowed upon me by the University today in the form of an Honorary Doctorate of Laws is received with heartfelt gratitude.

My career as an undergraduate included four full years of an Arts Degree, all of them on campus, before leaving for the law school in Phillip Street. I have always regretted that the law school was not part of the campus. I applaud the decision that has finally been made to move it here. It will enrich the lives of future law students, as it will enrich the intellectual life of the University as a whole. Some things will be lost. Special measures will be required to retain the close connection between the courts and the profession with the Law Faculty. I have no doubt, however, the move will be a positive one.

May I also applaud the choice of design. The Law Faculty last year had an inaugural alumni dinner at which models of the various tenders were displayed. The one chosen was clearly outstanding. Inevitably there must be sacrifices. The library will now be in the basement, instead of the students, but it is a magnificent building.

All of you will now be alumni, at a time when the University, and in particular the Law Faculty, is seeking to create a stronger relationship with its graduates than in the past. As is well known this is a tradition that the American universities have long since established, to their inestimable advantage, particularly financial, but not only such. It is no accident that the overwhelming proportion of the greatest universities in the world are now American. It is a reflection of the wealth of that nation. It is also a reflection of the way they organise their universities and their finances. Their relationship with alumni plays a critical role. We Australians will have to move in the same direction. The time when government finances were regarded as some kind of magic pudding - in which you could cut off a slice and it would just grow back - has long since gone.

All of you in the future will be called upon to support the Law Faculty through an alumni link. This has sometimes been portrayed as some kind of invitation to charity or at most an expression of gratitude. It should not only be so regarded. This is a matter of enlightened self-interest.

American law alumni form a distinct network. There is a bond between people who have shared the experience of attending the same institution, often being taught by the same people. From the point of view of new graduates this network can be of assistance in their development in the profession. However, even after you are well established in the profession, the stimulation of interaction with younger people who have graduated more recently has considerable advantages.

The degree you receive today has a reputation. That reputation is determined by the quality of the students, staff and course content of this Faculty over decades past. That reputation, and therefore the recognition that your degree will receive in the future, will be adversely affected if the quality of the degree is not sustained. It is in your own long term interests to do what you can to ensure that this Law Faculty continues to have the highest reputation.

I realise that many of you will not in fact practice law. Nevertheless, the significance of your legal training will manifest itself in numerous ways in your future careers. I wish you well in your journey.

In conclusion, I thank the Fellows of the Senate for the honour bestowed upon me by the award of this honorary degree.