A taster from a new biographical study of the late Justice Roderick Pitt Meagher:

Meagher's old clerk, Bill McMahon, cherished the memories of the innumerable witticisms to which he was privy…such as one uttered after a long lunch with Lynton Morris, when Meagher and Morris were in a crowded lift with McMahon on the way back to chambers. Renovations were being done in the Law Society building, and the lift was between floors when, to the great shock of everyone in the lift, a workman’s jack-hammer was pressed against the wall of the building that housed the lift well. Lynton Morris gave expression to his reaction when he said, “God Almighty, what was that?” Meagher’s reply: “I think it was a common lawyer having a thought.”

-          Damien Freeman, Roddy's Folly: R.P. Meagher QC, Art Lover and Lawyer (Connor Court, Australia, 2012) at pp 309-10.

The book is full of good things, not only the life story of an extravagantly talented, amusing and controversial lawyer, but also serious discussion of the intellectual, cultural and political world surrounding the Sydney bar and the law more generally in Australia. The book is graced with contributions from the Great Dissenters - a moving foreword by Dyson Heydon, and some uninhibited sketches of courtroom scenes drawn en banc by Michael Kirby as he sat with Roddy Meagher in the New South Wales Court of Appeal.

Admirers of Meagher Gummow and Lehane - and hostiles - will find this book engrossing.

Joshua Getzler