The Brennan Legacy

Traces of broader political battles are evidence throughout The Brennan Legacy which, although titled memorially, often seems more a work about contemporary tumult - including the Howard Government’s efforts at restricting asylum seekers’ access to justice, denounced scathingly (and correctly) by Brennan himself as a “conscious incursion upon the rule of law” in The Brennan Legacy, p15. - David Ritter, Australian Journal of Politics and History, Vol 50(3), 2004 This collection is designed to celebrate Sir Gerard Brennan’s contribution to the development of Australian administative law. Few would argue with the suggestion inferentially made by Stephen Gageler SC in his paper that Sir Gerard and his predecessor as Chief Justice of the High Court, Sir Anthony Mason, were the giants of Australian administrative law in the final quarter of the 20th century. … The essays … record the significance of Brennan’s influence upon the AAT, especially in the tribunal’s adoption of a ‘judicial’ approach to its work … Sir Gerard must be justly proud of the comment in the recent Leggatt Report (on the UK tribunal system) that Australia has the most advanced tribunal system in any common law jurisdiction. Both the Brennan and the Mason papers are valuable because they contain clearly distilled statements about their approaches to the developing jurisprudence of judicial review. … This is a book for the administrative law aficionado, for law students and for legal historians who seek an insider’s view … - Reform, Issue 82, 2003