| The Honourable Justice John Dyson Heydon AC, QC |
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|---|---|
| Justice of the High Court of Australia | |
| Incumbent | |
| Assumed office 1 February 2003 |
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| Nominated by | John Howard |
| Appointed by | Peter Hollingworth |
| Preceded by | Mary Gaudron |
| Personal details | |
| Born | 1 March 1943 Ottawa, Canada |
| Nationality | Australian |
| Occupation | Barrister, Judge |
John Dyson Heydon AC QC (born 1 March 1943 in Ottawa, Canada) is a Justice of the High Court of Australia; the highest court in the Australian court hierarchy.
After matriculating from Shore School, Heydon received a BA from Sydney University and an MA and BCL from University College, Oxford. He was a Rhodes Scholar.[1] He was a Fellow of Keble College Oxford, teaching public international law in the early 1970s.
Heydon was admitted to the New South Wales Bar in 1973. He was elected Dean of the University of Sydney Law School 1978 – 1979. He was appointed as a Queen's Counsel (QC) in 1987.
At age 30, Heydon became a Professor of law at the University of Sydney, the youngest person to reach that position.
Heydon was appointed as a Judge of the Court of Appeal of the Supreme Court of New South Wales in 2000.
He was appointed as a justice of the High Court in February 2003, a position he still holds. Under the Australian Constitution he must retire from the High Court by 2013 when he will be 70.
Heydon is known to be a conservative judge and has spoken out against judicial activism (judges who assume a law making role). His publicly expressed views, made whilst a New South Wales judge, were described by contemporaneous commentators as a "job application"[2] for appointment to the High Court by the conservative government of Prime Minister John Howard.[3][4]
He is also a legal scholar. He joined Sir James Gobbo and David Byrne to co-author the second Australian edition of Cross on Evidence in 1980, and became sole author of subsequent editions. He has also written The Restraint of Trade Doctrine and has taken over his colleague Justice Gummow as one of the editors of Meagher, Gummow, and Lehane's Equity: Doctrines and Remedies.
As of August 2011, Justice Heydon had increased his dissent rate to 47.6%,[5] dissenting most notably in the Plaintiff M70/2011 v Minister for Immigration and Citizenship (the Malaysian asylum seeker swap case) and Wainohu v New South Wales (the NSW "bikie laws" case).
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