Әустралияның бас судьясы: Энтони Мейсон өмірі мен қызметі

Australian judge

Sir Anthony Frank Mason HonFAIB DistFRSN (born 21 April 1925) is an Australian judge who served as the ninth Chief Justice of Australia, in office from 1987 to 1995. He was first appointed to the High Court in 1972, having previously served on the Supreme Court of New South Wales.

Raised in Sydney, Mason was a student at Sydney Grammar School. During World War II, he served in the Royal Australian Air Force, holding the rank of flying officer. After the war, Mason studied at the University of Sydney, graduating with the degrees of Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Laws. Mason articled at Clayton Utz, where he met his wife, Patricia.

Mason was admitted to the New South Wales Bar. For five years he lectured in law at the University of Sydney, his students including three future High Court Justices, Mary Gaudron, William Gummow and Dyson Heydon. In November 1964, aged 39, Mason was announced as the new Solicitor General of Australia, with an accompanying appointment as Queen's Counsel (QC). He was the first person to serve as solicitor general in a standalone capacity, as the office had previously been held by the secretary of the Attorney General's Department. In 1966 he appeared opposite future High Court colleague William Deane, successfully arguing that the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council should reject an appeal from the High Court case of R v Anderson; Ex parte IPEC Air Pty Ltd. He served until 1969 and during this time contributed greatly to the development of the Commonwealth's administrative law system.

In 1969, Mason was made a judge of the Supreme Court of New South Wales, where he sat as a member of the Court of Appeal. In the same year he was appointed by the Gorton government to a three year term on the council of the Australian National University. He served on the Supreme Court until 1972, when he was appointed to the bench of the High Court of Australia and received a knighthood (KBE). After fifteen years on the High Court, and following the retirement of Sir Harry Gibbs, in 1987 Mason was appointed Chief Justice; he retired in 1995 on reaching the constitutionally mandatory retirement age of 70. Mason had a significant influence over the High Court. Initially a conservative judge, his tenure as Chief Justice can be seen as the high water mark of the movement away from the "strict legalism" which characterised the High Court under Sir Owen Dixon. Mason was more flexible in his attitude to precedent than many other judges, viewing it more as a policy for consistency than something which would strictly coerce and constrain his decisions. During the years of the "Mason Court", a variety of important cases were decided. These included:
Cole v Whitfield (1988): a landmark decision on the meaning of Constitution section 92. The unanimous judgment observed (par. 7):

No provision of the Constitution has been the source of greater judicial concern or the subject of greater judicial effort than s.92. That notwithstanding, judicial exegesis of the section has yielded neither clarity of meaning nor certainty of operation. Over the years the Court has moved uneasily between one interpretation and another in its endeavours to solve the problems thrown up by the necessity to apply the very general language of the section to a wide variety of legislative and factual situations. Indeed, these shifts have been such as to make it difficult to speak of the section as having achieved a settled or accepted interpretation at any time since federation. The interpretation which came closest to achieving that degree of acceptance was that embodying the criterion of operation formula which we shall subsequently examine in some detail. That formula appeared to have the advantage of certainty, but that advantage proved to be illusory. Its disadvantage was that it was concerned only with the formal structure of an impugned law and ignored its real or substantive effect. For the first time, the Constitution was interpreted with systematic reference to records of the constitutional conventions of the 1890s in which the text of the Constitution had been agreed (a good edition of the records had recently appeared). The Court also examined not only the "legal" operation of a law (its effects upon legal relations) but also its "practical" operation (its "real or substantive", i. e. social or economic, effects). However, the facts in Cole v Whitfield were relatively simple and the Court soon divided in attempts to apply the criterion of practical operation to more complex facts: Bath v Alston Holdings (1988) and Castlemaine Tooheys v South Australia (1990). Polyukhovich v Commonwealth (1991): Mason was in the 4:3 majority who decided, although for a variety of reasons, that retrospective war crimes legislation applying to events in Europe during World War II was a valid exercise of the external affairs power, Constitution section 51(xxix), and was consistent with the judicial power of the Commonwealth, Constitution ch III. Mabo v Queensland (No.2) (1992): the colonialist doctrine of terra nullius was superseded by introducing "native title" into Australian law. The decision provoked allegations of "judicial activism", but was soon given statutory form in the Native Title Act 1993 (Cth). Australian Capital Television v Commonwealth (1992) and (decided on the same day) Nationwide News v Wills (1992): an important stage in the emergence of a constitutionally implied "freedom of political communication". The Mason Court continued this development until 1994, but it was not to receive unanimous support on the Court until after Mason's departure, in Lange v Australian Broadcasting Corporation (1997). This freedom was considered to be implicit in Constitution sections 7 and 24, which provide that the Commonwealth Parliament shall be "directly chosen by the people". However, the Court has remained reluctant to find further implied freedoms. It has also continued to understand such a "freedom" as a limitation upon legislative power and not, at least directly, a personal freedom or right. Dietrich v The Queen (1992): an accused is entitled to publicly funded legal representation where that is necessary to a fair trial (Mason among the majority). Minister for Immigration and Ethnic Affairs v Teoh (1995): the high point in Australia of the idea of "legitimate expectation", which Mason favoured although in this and other cases other members of the Court criticised it for illogicality and fictionality. The decision provoked formal ministerial objections, but bills to reverse the precedent failed three times with the calling of a general election. The Court has since considerably reduced the scope of the idea. After retiring from the High Court, in 1997 Mason was appointed one of the Non Permanent Judges of the Hong Kong Court of Final Appeal, a position that he held until 2015. He was also President of the Court of Appeal of the Solomon Islands and was a judge on the Supreme Court of Fiji. In addition to those judicial roles, from 1994 to 1999 Mason served as Chancellor of the University of New South Wales. From 1996 to 1997, he was a professor of legal science at the University of Cambridge and served as Chairman of the Council of National Library of Australia in 1997–1998. He is also a visiting fellow at the Faculty of Law at the Australian National University.