Week 127: Jesting Pilate

Owen Dixon, Jesting Pilate and Other Papers and Addresses (1965)

Sir Owen Dixon was one of Australia’s greatest ever legal minds, and the personal legal mentor of Robert Menzies. In fact Menzies was one of only three legal pupils Dixon would take on during his time at the bar.

While a reflection of the talents which Dixon clearly recognised in Menzies, this patronage was a great leg up for Menzies’s career. As Dixon’s junior Counsel, Menzies first appeared before the High Court of Australia at just the age of 23. In the end he would appear with Dixon in a dozen cases before the Court, as well as many more before the Supreme Court of Victoria.

Despite this close association, once Dixon was himself appointed to the High Court he would not always rule in Menzies’s favour. Most notably during the landmark ruling over the Communist Party Dissolution Act 1950, Dixon concurred with the other judges that the Defence Power could not be used to ban the Communist Party of Australia while Australia was not technically at war.

Nevertheless, Menzies never lost the immense respect he had for his former mentor. When Dixon retired from the High Court in 1964, Menzies personally ensured he had a grand send off. On the occasion, Menzies delivered a speech in which he described Dixon as ‘the greatest legal advocate I saw either here or abroad’. Menzies went on to relate an anecdote about an occasion when his wife Pattie expressed doubt as to some opinion that Menzies had offered, to which he replied, ‘Well, Dixon thinks so, and that’s good enough for me’. She retorted: ‘Bob, I think you ought to realise that Dixon is not God!’ To which Menzies replied, ‘You’re quite right, my dear; but only just’.

Dixon’s own speech from his retirement party is one of many which make up Jesting Pilate and Other Papers and Addresses. The titular address was one Dixon gave in Melbourne in 1957, and its provocative title referred to a line in Francis Bacon’s essay On Truth, ‘What is truth? said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer’. Bacon in turn was referring to the Gospel passage John 18:38, in which Pontius Pilate questions Jesus’s ability to testify to the truth, but concludes that he can find no evidence of the crime He is alleged to have committed.

Dixon skilfully uses this as an insight into the immense responsibility of judges to find the truth, given the implications their decisions have on the lives of others. Yet Dixon also insists that judges must believe that they can ascertain the truth, and that careful examination, deliberation and dialectical discussion can ultimately reveal it. No-where in the Western canon is a judge’s responsibility more profound than in the case of Pilate, who condemns Christ Himself to crucifixion.