The Life of Chief Justice Way
Sydney, Angus and Robertson, 1960.
Octavo, xiv, 268 pages plus 9 plates.
Papered boards lightly bumped at the head and foot of the spine; essentially a fine copy with the lightly used price-clipped dustwrapper.
Sir Samuel James Way (1836-1916) was 'for many years Lieutenant-Governor and Chief Justice of South Australia, and Chancellor of the University of Adelaide' (dustwrapper blurb). The 'Australian Dictionary of Biography' is somewhat less prosaic: 'Sir Samuel Way was not a great jurist. His pragmatic cast of mind inhibited intensive historical research or jurisprudential analysis. At times he strained the law to produce the result which he thought justice and common sense demanded ... But he was conscientious, intelligent and industrious, and his verdicts gave general satisfaction.... There was a touch of vanity about him, and an element of the complacency and self-satisfaction of his era. For all that, Way was by nineteenth-century standards a great man who left an enduring mark on South Australian life. Beatrice Webb had found him a "grizzled, bearded little man, insignificant in features, voluble and diffusive in speech, with more authority than dignity in his manner; he neither pleases nor impresses ... At first he seems a fussy little methodist ... presently you discover that he is both good and wise. With intimacy one learns to appreciate his wide experience of men and things, his large-minded cultivation and above all his continuous application in advancing what he believes to be right'.
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