Judge Willis: a Man of Books - A talk given for Rare Book Week 2014 (Part 2)
Janine Rizzetti, La Trobe University
In recognition of Rare Books Week, I’d like to turn to John Walpole Willis as a man of books. Of course, this is true of any judge, as the legal profession and judicial identity is very much bound up in books, words and their interpretation.
He was a keen frequenter of libraries. In Upper Canada, when he was criticized for meeting with the Reformers at Parliament, he said that he was just visiting the library as he usually did, located in the same building. In Sydney he found amongst the holdings of the Australian Subscription Library a confidential document from the British Cabinet. He took it to Governor Gipps who confiscated it, much to the annoyance of the library committee, who called Willis’ act of taking the papers “a mean, lickspittle business”, unworthy of a gentleman.
Justice John Walpole Willis had visions of a law library here in Melbourne, but it didn’t eventuate for another ten years under Redmond Barry. In 1842 when Willis heard that there was a proposal to establish a law library in Sydney to be funded by practitioners’ admission fees, he quickly suggested that a similar library be established in Melbourne too. He had visions that it would emulate the law library in Edinburgh or Chancery Lane. And once it was established, Willis announced, “all the law books he had would be gladly contributed, including a valuable copy of corpus juris civilis, being the only one, he believed, in the colony.”
He loaned books to the Governor and his brother judges, and in 1839 a notice appeared in the Sydney newspapers that he had lost the second volume of Harrisons Index, thereby destroying his set. Books were probably included in the 43 and a half tons of luggage that he brought to Port Phillip from Sydney, and books were put up for sale when he quickly sold up his possessions to return to England to challenge his dismissal.
And I wish that I was able to find out- and maybe someone here will know- if and how many of John Walpole Willis’ books found their way into the “Willis Bund Library of Antiquarian and Other Books” that were donated to the Worcester Library by Willis’ son, the rather splendidly named antiquarian historian John William Bund Willis-Bund. They were auctioned in 45 lots by Philip Serrell in January 2009 after being stored in the basement of the Library for the past 40 years.
We can see evidence of Willis’ reading and his reliance on the texts in his library in his own writing and speeches. We see it in his carefully constructed addresses to the jury that were published in full in the newspapers. We see it in the reports that he generated for Governors over the length of his career on subjects as diverse as creating baronets for the Upper Canadian parliament to the construction of siloes on Cockatoo Island. And we see it in his own 1850 publication, On the Government of the British Colonies, which spelled out Willis’ thinking on colonial policy, no longer as judge but as political commentator. All these works are well-crafted, long, erudite pieces of writing, full of citations and Latin quotations that testify to Willis’ reading of the law, classics, literature, geography, theology, history and current affairs.
We catch a glimpse of this reading, too, in the final of the case books, Volume 18, a commonplace book which he himself titled ‘Memoranda’. Commonplace books were generally compiled when a reader came across a quotation that struck him or her as particularly apposite and elegant. In his book, he has compiled quotations from law and literature and created his own texts under headings that reflect the nature of the crimes that he encountered in his courtroom. Some headings address questions that might be canvassed during an address to the jury . One page is headed “Insanity- how far an excuse for crime?” while under “Murder and Manslaughter”, he teases out the distinctions between the two crimes. The pages “Drunkenness” and “Perjury” and “Terror of Evil Doers” seem to be paragraphs that he has composed himself for use in court, although I must admit that, despite my best efforts, I haven’t been able to find reports where he actually used these words.
Then there are the headings that pertain to law in the abstract sense: punishment, law, power, detention and opposition. The quotations under these headings are perhaps the most suggestive of Willis’ own view of himself, his role, and his sense of crusade in upholding British justice in a colonial setting. It is here that we see the influence of his reading as he extracts particular paragraphs from literature, law, theology and travel literature and juxtaposes them against each other in a sort of intellectual and textual conversation.
I am struck by the prominence of two sources. The first is Shakespeare and the second is the Trial of Warren Hastings, and especially the speeches of Edmund Burke- a trial that questioned the character and authority of governors in colonial settings, and went to the question of law and power in the British empire.1 These were questions indeed for a politically controversial judge.
It’s significant that no-one, even Willis’ most strident critics, ever criticized his intelligence or learning. And through the casebooks and his commonplace book, we see part of the mosaic of the intellect, complexity and contradictions of John Walpole Willis, Melbourne’s first resident Supreme Court Judge.
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