Waugh on The Judges and Their Court 1852-1900 (Victoria, Australia)

John Waugh, Melbourne Law School, has published The Judges and Their Court 1852–1900 in Judging For the People: A Social History of the Supreme Court in Victoria 1841-2016) (Simon Smith, ed., Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2016). Here is the abstract.

The Supreme Court of the new colony of Victoria was born in the midst of the gold rush. As population soared, cases poured into the court at a rate the judges could barely handle. Compared with the labour of clearing that avalanche, the court’s history for the rest of the century was a long anti-climax, as social and economic changes that are yet to be fully explored reduced its work to a smaller number of longer cases. On the bench, migrants from England and Ireland began to make way for judges born and educated in Australia.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.