A High Court judge has launched an extraordinary attack on a conservative legal group that is closely associated with one of his own colleagues, accusing it of trying to stack Australian courts with right-wing jurists.
In a sign of tensions within the nation’s top court, Justice Robert Beech-Jones delivered a speech last week condemning the Samuel Griffith Society, a well-known body that often platforms right-wing lawyers and has in recent years hosted speakers such as disgraced ex-High Court judge Dyson Heydon and former attorney-general Christian Porter.
But the society is perhaps best known for its ties to another current High Court judge, Simon Steward, widely seen as the court’s most conservative member. Steward is a three-time speaker at the society’s annual conference, and the body was an important source of support for Steward’s 2020 nomination to the court by the Morrison government.
At the Griffith Society’s 2025 conference, Steward delivered the keynote lecture and was introduced by yet another High Court judge, James Edelman, who described Steward as a “conservative in the proudest tradition, which is the conservation of precedent”.
The society is named after Australia’s first chief justice, Queenslander Samuel Griffith. But in his speech last week, Beech-Jones said the society’s conduct was an “abuse of Griffith’s legacy” – and that its attempt to spread “student chapters” across Australian universities was “ominous”.
Beech-Jones attacked what he said were the society’s ambitions to import conservative US legal ideas into Australia – chief among them what he described as “court stacking”, the practice of appointing judges along party-political lines, often with backing from politicised legal groups.
Beech-Jones pointed to proposals made in 2020 by former federal senator Amanda Stoker, now a Liberal National state MP in Queensland, who called on the Griffith Society to create a “pipeline of potential judicial nominees”, by “screening” judicial appointments and “recruiting” law students and young lawyers, including through “clerkships with conservative judges”.
“There is a highly sophisticated legal term to describe that process; it’s known as court stacking,” Beech-Jones said, referring to the conservative takeover of the US Supreme Court.
According to Beech-Jones, this “politicised and political process” of court stacking has left the US courts full of “supine judges”, mostly thanks to the effort of an American group of conservative lawyers called the Federalist Society.
Their playbook is what the Samuel Griffith Society is now trying to copy, the judge declared, pointing to recent comments by conservative columnist Janet Albrechtsen, who encouraged the Griffith Society to find a “quiet billionaire” to support its efforts.
“Ordinarily, all this would be none of my business, but these methods are being advocated for in Australia,” Beech-Jones said. “To adapt a phrase, they have driven into my lane, and they have driven into yours.”
If successful, these efforts would be disastrous for Australian law, according to Beech-Jones, who clarified that judges in Australia are not yet “the product of ideological training schools”.
“If anyone thinks this particular US style of court stacking and judicial decision-making is a good idea, then go and live there. The rule of law appears to be having an interesting time in that country.”
“Which approach do you prefer? Theirs or ours?”
Samuel Griffith Society’s executive director Mia Schlicht said it was “inappropriate” for “a serving judge to attempt to shut down criticism” of how the High Court was interpreting the constitution.
“The Samuel Griffith Society is a debating society, not a political organisation,” said Schlicht, who until recently was also a fellow at the conservative think tank the Institute of Public Affairs.
“We hold the simple view that judges should apply the Constitution as written, not as they think it ought to be written.
“We invite contributors from across the legal, political and academic spectrum, and we foster disagreement. We extended that invitation to Justice Beech-Jones himself, and he declined.”
Schlicht also defended the society’s student chapter program, which she said existed “because university law schools have become ideological monocultures”.
“We want students to encounter arguments they will not hear in the lecture theatre.”
A spokeswoman for the High Court said that “individual justices determine the topics on which they speak extra-curially”. “The chief justice does not comment publicly on the engagements of particular justices.”
Beech-Jones was also highly critical of the right-wing body’s sustained attacks on the High Court’s famous Mabo decision, which overturned the colonial concept of terra nullius and gave native title land rights to Indigenous people.
Established in 1992, the same year the Mabo judgment was delivered, the society’s “original intention” or “gripe… bordering on obsession” was to take aim at native title law.
“One of the papers compared [Mabo] to a disease. Some of them were virulent. Some were generally abusive,” Beech-Jones said, quoting from one Griffith Society speaker, Kenneth Minogue, who described Indigenous people as “a pretty incompetent lot, who are difficult to help”.
“Does Griffith deserve to have his legacy associated with that sentiment? Beech Jones asked. “Perhaps the better question is, if you are a law student today contemplating all of this, is that the way you wish to define yourself?”
Source: Agitated-Fee3598