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Justice 12 October 1906 to 1 April 1930
Chief Justice 2 April 1930 to 21 January 1931

Lawyer, parliamentarian, judge, and the first Australian-born Governor-General, Isaac Isaacs (1855-1948) possessed a prodigious work ethic and passionate desire to declare himself an ‘Australian’ in the new Federation.¹ Highlighting Isaacs’s extraordinary achievements, Alfred Deakin wrote: ‘the son of a struggling tailor in an up-country town, he had an unpromising an outlook as could well be imagined for such a career as his proved’.²

Isaacs was born in Melbourne, though his family moved to regional Victoria in his youth. At 15 he became a pupil–teacher at Beechworth and continued teaching there until 1875. In 1876, he joined the Crown Law Department in Melbourne and studied law part-time at the University of Melbourne, graduating with first-class honours (1880) and a Master of Laws (1883).³ He began practice at the Victorian Bar in 1882, supplementing his income by writing court reports for the Press.

Isaacs married Deborah Jacobs in 1888; they had two daughters.⁴ By 1899 he ‘was one of the leading figures at the Victorian Bar’ and was appointed a QC.⁵ Erudite and ambitious, he was elected to the Victorian colonial and early Commonwealth parliaments, serving as Attorney-General in both.

In 1906, Isaacs was appointed to the High Court of Australia, alongside Henry Higgins,⁶ ‘disrupt[ing] the harmony of views amongst the foundation Justices’.⁷ For much of his first 15 years, Isaacs was the great ‘dissenter in important constitutional cases’, his expansive view of Commonwealth powers putting him at odds with his colleagues.⁸ As the bench changed over time, Isaacs’s opinions came to prevail.

The 1920 Engineers judgement authored by Isaacs was a watershed moment in Australian constitutional interpretation, the doctrines it established leading over time to the Commonwealth assuming a dominant position in the Federation.⁹

For the better part of a decade, Isaacs was the Court’s driving intellectual force, asserting ‘a wide reach of national power’.¹⁰ Widely read, he peppered his judgements with literary references ‘as well as copious legal authority’,¹¹ opening him to criticisms of his ‘rhetorical and verbose’ judicial style.¹² He was one of the first Australian judges ‘to give explicit recognition to the social implications of decision making’.¹³ After serving as a Puisne Justice for 23 years, Isaacs was elevated to Chief Justice on 2 April 1930, after Owen Dixon suggested that April 1 would be an inauspicious start.¹⁴ He would remain Chief Justice for only 42 weeks as in early 1931 he was offered the role of Governor-General by Prime Minister Scullin. Despite his age, he ‘was one of the most successful and popular Governors-General Australia had to that time’.¹⁵ In 1937 he was awarded a GCB.

Isaacs died at the age of 92, having outlived all other members of the 1897–98 Constitutional Convention.¹⁶ Sir Owen Dixon remembered him as a jurist with ‘a concentration of mind and intellectual resourcefulness’ that was unparalleled.¹⁷