The resolution of inconsistent state and territory legislation

Abstract

It is a great pleasure to contribute to a festschrift devoted to celebrating the 80th anniversary of our friend and colleague, Emeritus Professor Leslie Zines. His contribution to the study of Australian constitutional law is too well known to require any reinforcement from us. It spans a period of five decades. His principal book The High Court and the Constitution1 has been and continues to be at the forefront of constitutional scholarship since it was first published. That book and his other writings represent the distilled essence of much of his valuable and incisive understanding of the way the High Court interprets and should interpret, the Constitution - something which has held a life-long fascination for him. In his publications as in his many years of teaching, he displays not only a mastery of the technical and analytical aspects of public law, but a social and functional awareness that goes well beyond deriving the meaning and application of many provisions of the Constitution by the mere contemplation of the language used or by the canons of construction. Overall he was and continues to be a teacher in the widest sense of that term. He has had the good fortune to see the High Court accept many of his ideas as well as the more open kind of reasoning which he advocated in successive editions of his book - even if, in the last edition, he has felt less satisfied with the mode of reasoning adopted by the modern Court involving the use of legalistic techniques with less reliance on values and policy considerations.