High Court judges who are also public intellectuals and popular icons are exceedingly rare. Dr H.V. Evatt was one in his time; more controversially, Lionel Murphy may have been one; but on any view, Michael Kirby was one. Kirby, who served on the High Court from 1996 to 2009, has been in or near the spotlight for a long time. It is not surprising that since his retirement several books about him have been published. One of them is concerned with his work as a judge, and will appeal principally to an audience of lawyers. A.J. Brown’s biography, on the other hand, is likely to engage the general reader as well as lawyers. It tells the story of a highly gifted man, but keeps him squarely in the realm of mortals.

Given Kirby’s cult status (in the community at least, and in some parts of the legal profession), it might be thought that this book would be an exercise in hagiography. It is not. To the contrary, it is a clear-eyed study of a person who has enormous gifts, vast energy, and a reassuring quota of flaws. It has to be said that the balance comes down comfortably in Kirby’s favour. As a confessed admirer of Kirby, I would say the author has the balance about right.

Kirby’s capacity for work is astounding. I recall one of my earliest encounters with him: we had spoken on the same platform in 1981 on matters concerning computers and the law. I got a phone call from him a few weeks later. It was a Sunday morning. He rang me at home at about 8 a.m. His opening line was: ‘I rang you in chambers, but you weren’t there.’ At the time, I thought he was showing off. Anyone who reads Brown’s book will see that it was a completely unselfconscious reflection of his appetite for work.

From school days at Fort Street High, Kirby approached his studies with unparalleled discipline, remarkable even allowing for the strictures of a Protestant upbringing in the 1940s and 1950s. As a schoolboy he summarised his textbooks; he developed a technique for keeping notes that enabled him to categorise his emerging knowledge of things. It is touching to think of the young Kirby, striving diligently at school, trying to show that he was the equal of anyone, but from an early age knowing that he might never quite fit in. It is tempting to imagine that this haunting sense of incipient rejection was a constant spur to show how well he could do.

Life for a homosexual in the 1950s was lonely and dangerous. Homosexuality was not discussed; it was emphatically not tolerated. Kirby concealed his sexuality from everyone throughout school and university. When fortune introduced him to Johan van Vloten, his gauche attempts to impress nearly spoiled the encounter and all of its possibilities. Fortunately, Johan overlooked Kirby’s clumsiness, and their relationship bloomed, but for years after they began living together, Johan’s presence in the house was airbrushed away when Kirby was entertaining professional colleagues. In keeping with the spirit of the times and the constraints of a conservative profession, Johan remained professionally invisible for decades, while providing one of the indispensable anchors in Kirby’s private life.

One of the great paradoxes of Kirby’s life is his innate conservatism. On first meeting him in 1959, Neville Wran thought he was ‘a bit of a swell’. Early on, Kirby’s aunt Gloria assessed him as ‘brainy, but a reactionary’, although it has to be said that this assessment was recorded in Kirby’s ASIO file. That he had an ASIO file probably says more about ASIO and student politics than it does about Kirby. It is interesting to speculate whether his ASIO file also notes that he is a devout monarchist.

Those who, for their own reasons, have criticised Kirby as a judge have generally done so by attacking him as a radical. He was not at all radical, unless it is radical to search for legitimate ways to interpret laws so as to protect rights rather than to defeat them, while adhering to the principle of legality. Unlike some judges, Kirby implicitly embraces Clarence Darrow’s observation that ‘Laws should be like clothes. They should be made to fit the people they serve.’ It is a strange thing that such an approach should attract criticism; stranger still that searching for justice in law should be regarded as ‘radical’.

It is tempting to think that the real reasons for the attacks on Kirby were either homophobia (Senator Heffernan’s intemperate attack certainly was) or an instinctive dislike of personal publicity in a conservative profession. Kirby’s capacity for shy self-promotion meant that he regularly attracted news coverage. Very soon after being appointed as a judge of the Industrial Court, Kirby was invited to be inaugural chair of the Australian Law Reform Commission. Despite the traditional reserve of the legal profession, Kirby quickly recognised the value of publicity to advance the cause of law reform. His forays into public relations brought law reform to the people, and soon Kirby became a household name. Brown suggests that this was not entirely unpleasing to Kirby, but it was not universally popular among more conservative members of the profession. Brown notes that ‘His difficulties in the legal profession … had been fed by reactions to a man who seemed addicted to collecting status, titles, honours and fame.’ While noting Kirby’s admirable qualities, David Marr – not a stuffy conservative despite having completed a law degree, and certainly not homophobic – commented that Kirby’s vanity was ‘colossal’.

When Kirby later became President of the Court of Appeal of New South Wales, a number of judges resented his continued practice of speaking publicly and drawing attention to various issues, but also to himself. It seems likely that the accumulated hostility, spiced with jealousy, sharpened the reaction of some judges to various reforms that Kirby advanced. He noticed that women were increasingly accepting appointments to the bench, which led to a degree of confusion about the way they should be referred to. Were they ‘Mrs Justice X’ or ‘Ms Justice X’ or something else? He was the first judge of an Australian court to suggest that gender neutrality would serve the need of the moment, and would wash away at least one lingering marker of male bias in the judiciary. He proposed to his colleagues on the Court of Appeal that the judges should all be referred to simply as ‘Justice X’, rather than the traditional ‘Mr Justice X’. This modest proposal provoked an acid response from one judge, who wrote to him: ‘The form I prefer has the backing of centuries of history … I have no desire to be gender neutral – I am male, and not ashamed of the fact.’

As president of the New South Wales Court of Appeal, and as a judge of the High Court, Kirby continued to speak publicly on an astonishing range of subjects. Over the past few years, he has spoken about subjects as diverse as Martha Nussbaum, the Dreyfus case, running in the Queen’s Baton Relay, National Security, the New Genetics, Appropriate Activism, and Australian Corporations Law and Global Forces. The list of his speeches and papers is vast. Even allowing for the fact that some speeches plough the same furrow, the reach and scale of his intellectual output is astounding, and still it continues.

Unsurprisingly, Brown’s book records in detail the shameful attack on Kirby by Senator Heffernan in March 2002. The allegations that Heffernan made under cover of parliamentary privilege were inevitably damaging to Kirby and were intended to be so. The attack was false, and was based on fabricated evidence. It was a calculated attempt to unseat a High Court judge by public vilification where constitutional processes would have certainly failed. Kirby received very few signs of support from the members of the Court, and none from the government. Neither Prime Minister John Howard nor Attorney-General Daryl Williams did anything to blunt the attack. It is difficult to imagine a more painful experience in public life, but when the attack failed and Heffernan was forced to apologise, Kirby accepted the apology with good grace. He has said publicly that he regrets the inclusion of that chapter in the book because it reflects badly on Heffernan. Easily said in the comfort of victory, but wholly consistent with his stoical response at the time.

This is a fine book about a remarkable man.