Sir Bruce Robertson

31/12/2009

When Judge Bruce Robertson (1957-61) received recognition in the New Year’s honours for services as a judge of the High Court and the Court of Appeal, he also became the second milk monitor from the 1954 standard 3 class at Wakari School and the Otago Boys’ High School intake of 1957 to be knighted.

Sir Bruce Robertson

His classmate and fellow milk monitor and judge, Sir John Hansen (1957-62), received a knighthood for services to the judiciary in 2008.

Sir Bruce, who lives in Wellington, said he felt humbled and honoured to receive a knighthood, and considered it was a way of the community acknowledging and affirming the importance of the rule of law in a free society.

In accepting the knighthood, he felt he was doing so on behalf of a team and that it was an acknowledgement of the role played by all court staff.

He described his 22-year career as a High Court judge as exciting, but while he had presided over high-profile cases including that concerning the death of Peter Plumley Walker, such cases were not the most important or the most satisfying.

‘‘I think the great challenge of law is that it doesn’t become an end in itself.

‘‘It is merely there to help people deal with problems they can’t deal with. It worries me when the law starts to get feet of its own and a life of its own.’’

He was known among his colleagues for insisting on reality checks when hearing cases, he said.

The highlights of his career as a judge had been those cases which were not terribly high profile.

In civil cases, they were the occasions when he had been able to help parties reach an outcome both could live with and, in criminal cases, those when at the end of a trial ‘‘everybody feels they got a fair crack of the whip’’.

Sir Bruce said the law was not easily accessible to people and ‘‘none of us should run away from the fact that the current system is too expensive, too slow and operates at a level people feel unfamiliar and uncomfortable with.’’

In his time as president of the Law Commission, between 2001 and 2005, he had spent much time looking at ways to improve access to justice, although he noted that many judges and lawyers were not ‘‘terribly keen’’ on changing.

There had been a revolution in the criminal area where, instead of crime being considered an offence against society, there was a focus on issues of victims’ rights.

Sir Bruce will retire from both the High Court of New Zealand and the Court of Appeal at the beginning of February, but he anticipates continuing judicial duties in the Pacific. He said he felt a real obligation to help the rule of law there, which was ‘‘pretty fragile’’.

He has served as president of the Court of Appeal of Vanuatu since 1996 and has also sat on the Court of Appeal of Samoa.

He would also be keen to be involved in any efforts to break the impasse in relations between New Zealand and Australia and Fiji-.His first Pacific involvement was teaching with Volunteer Service Abroad on a remote Samoan island at age 20.

In his ‘‘retirement’’, he also intended to return to some of his other interests, including education.

When he was 38, he became the youngest University of Otago pro-chancellor and he spent 20 years on the university council. It had been a long journey from milk monitor to knight, but he had been fortunate with lucky breaks and some wonderful mentors, including the late Very Rev Dr Jack Somerville (1925-28), Sir Bruce said.

He had come from an ‘‘unbelievably supportive’’ family, and had grown up in a similarly supportive and encouraging community.

After attending Otago Boys’ High School, Sir Bruce graduated from Otago University with both a BA and an LLB.

At 23, when he was the Otago University Students Association president, he came to the public’s attention by organising a sleep-in for 1500 at the student union building to protest about a fellow student being expelled for living in a mixed flat.

Sir Bruce furthered his studies in 1972-73, when a Harkness Fellowship took him to the University of Virginia, from where he graduated with a masterate in family law and was much influenced by the university’s founding president Thomas Jefferson’s commitment to principled freedom and liberalism.

Sir Bruce’s life since student days included a career with law firm Ross, Dowling Marquet and Griffin, part-time law lecturing, and serving as a session clerk at Knox Church.

He has strong views about people making the most of the opportunities offered them.

In a small country such as New Zealand ‘‘we have to be careful we aren’t so busy chopping down tall poppies that we become grey and dour and boggy’’.

New Zealanders had enormous potential which needed to be exploited and harnessed in all fields.

If people had the ability to do something they should always do it to their ‘‘absolute best’’, as this was the only way the country would survive, he said.

Sir Bruce is a Fellow of the Foundation.

Sir Bruce’s recognition completes a high profile year for Otago Boys’ Old Boys – at the late-August investiture at Government House in Wellington no fewer than four Old Boys became Knights – Sir Lloyd Gerring (1931-35), Sir David Mauger (1953-57), Sir John Hansen (1957-62) and Sir Russell Coutts (1975-79).