Christian Lawyers Association
by Hon. Mr Justice B.H. McPherson CBE

You do me great honour by inviting me to be President of this Association. Closer acquaintance with the shortcomings of my own faith and character would commend others who are better fitted for office. But letting the cock crow thrice is something that none of us can afford.

Your presence here in such numbers is testimony to our common faith and individual commitment to the ideals of this Association.

Its purpose is, I stress, not to emulate the pharisee in thanking God that he was not like other men. Our purpose is revealed in the memorable words of the prophet Micah, to which the constitution of the Association gives prominence:

"To do justice, and love mercy, and walk humbly with God".

For those like us who have tasted the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of the Law, it is the third of those injunctions that often is the hardest to fulfil.

Personally, I first came upon the words of Micah as a law student, not (as I should have done) by reading the Bible; but in the preface to a textbook on South African Mercantile Law. To my discredit, I confess that it was only within the last two years that I discovered the context in which those words were spoken. The Israelites were complaining, as they (and we) often do, about the excessive demands made upon them by their religion, which, they said, seemed incapable of being satisfied:

Will the Lord (they asked) be pleased if we sacrifice
thousands of our rams, or 10,000 rivers of oil?

Then, slyly dredging up an ancient grievance from the time of Abraham, they asked:

"Shall I give my first born for my transgression?
The fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?"

Micah’s response was simple and direct. God had never asked for anything like that. Instead:

"He has taught thee, O man, what is good.
For what doth the Lord require of thee
But to do justice
And love mercy
And walk humbly with thy God."

Together we administer a legal system which, in its origins, has been credited with conceiving the idea of a government that is not above the law, but subject to it. It has not always been so in other systems. In a well known passage, Justinian’s Institutes of Roman Civil Law opens by saying that law is whatever may please the ruler. He was, of course, speaking as a Roman emperor. From an early time English legal writers like Bracton, Fortescue and Sir Edward Coke never lost the chance of pointing out that, under our system, the King, or (as we now call it) the executive government, is subject to no one except God and the law. It is a rather large exception, which it took a civil war to settle. Much later, the idea was embodied in s.4 of the Act of Settlement in 1701, which declared that the King and his ministers of government were bound to obey the law of the land. Lex rex and not rex lex was the way some people put it. The law is king. The King is not the law.

The rule of law, as we call it now, is something we strive to uphold. The judiciary in Queensland are called on the swear before God that they will do justice according to law, and to all people, without fear, favour or ill will.

It is not too clear where English law first picked up the idea of the rule of law, but it goes back at least as far as the coronation oaths of the Saxon kings, who were required to swear they would uphold the law of the land. I would not be surprised if the prophet Micah was one of its sources. As a minor prophet, he is remembered for only one other purple passage:

they shall bear their swords into ploughshares
and their spears into pruning hooks.

Micah lived in a period rather like our own, when faith and morals were breaking down. He was looking forward to the day when the Lord would judge between peoples. Then, he says, everyone would sit under his own vine or fig tree; there would be peace; and no one would live in fear. War and bitterness between nations and people would be no more.

It is an ideal that those of who are here believe the law cannot achieve without the help of God. What Micah foreshadowed is the kind of society that Christian Lawyers aim to achieve. Which is why each of us is proud to acknowledge, and to show through our actions, that we belong to that faith and that tradition.