Lex Lasry QC (born 8 July 1948) is a prominent Australian lawyer and a judge in the Supreme Court of Victoria.
Lasry graduated from Haileybury College, Melbourne then Monash University in Melbourne. He was admitted to practise law in Victoria in 1973 and was appointed Queens Counsel in 1990. [1]
Lasry is the former chair of the Victorian Criminal Bar Association. In August 2004 he was appointed as the independent observer representing the Law Council of Australia at the trial of Australian Guantanamo Bay detainee David Hicks. [2] He attended Military Commission hearings at Guantanamo Bay in August 2004 and March 2007.
Between 2003 and 2006 Lasry acted as senior counsel assisting the Coronial inquiry into the 2003 Canberra bushfires.
Lasry has acted as defence counsel in several high-profile criminal cases in Australia and overseas. He acted on behalf of Joseph Thomas in a high-profile Australian terror trial (see R v Thomas) in which Thomas was convicted of receiving funds from a terrorist organisation and for passport offences. The conviction was overturned on appeal. Lasry represented Van Tuong Nguyen in the high-profile case in which Van Nguyen was convicted of drug trafficking in Singapore in 2004 and executed in December 2005. Recently Lasry has taken up the case of two of the Australians convicted of drug trafficking in Indonesia, known as the "Bali nine". [3]
Lasry was entitled to practise law in the Australian jurisdictions of Victoria, New South Wales, the Northern Territory, Queensland, South Australia, and Western Australia. [4] He is also a member of the Council of the International Criminal Bar for counsel practising before the International Court of Justice. He also chaired appellate hearings for the Confederation of Australian Motor Sport (CAMS) and for V8 Supercar racing. He holds a motor racing licence. [5] Lasry had chambers in Melbourne, Sydney, and Canberra.
Lasry was appointed as a justice of the Supreme Court of Victoria on 23 October 2007[6][7]. He was the trial judge for the murder trial against Hugo Alastair Rich and, more recently, the re-trial of Robert Farquharson.
He is a long time supporter of the St Kilda Football Club.