Mark Robinson SC

Australian Barrister

Mark is a Sydney Senior Counsel practising in administrative law and general law at Macquarie Street Chambers. He is the author of New South Wales Administrative Law, a two-volume looseleaf service, published by Thomson Reuters which covers the New South Wales Civil and Administrative Tribunal, Supreme Court judicial review, freedom of information and privacy.

AREAS OF PRACTICE

Administrative Law

General Law

Appellate Law

Constitutional Law

Criminal Law

As it rarely happens that a man is fit to plead his own cause, lawyers are a class of the community, who, by study and experience, have acquired the art and power of arranging evidence, and of applying to the points at issue what the law has settled. A lawyer is to do for his client all that his client might fairly do for himself, if he could.

(Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) in Boswell’s Life of Johnson, 1770)

A man’s house is his castle.

(Sir Edward Coke, Institutes: Commentary upon Littleton, 1628)

There’s no better way of using the imagination than the study of law. No poet ever interpreted nature as freely as a lawyer interprets truth.

(Jean Giraudoux (1882-1944) Tiger at the Gaates, 1935, trans, Christopher Fry)

The power of the lawyer is in the uncertainty of the law.

Jeremy Bentham quotes ( Philosopher and Activist. 1748-1832)

Lawyers generally prefer not to rush things.

(Justice Kirby (Australian Law Reform Commission, on the 52 years it has taken for lawyers to join scientists at ANZAAS) Sydney Morning Herald, Sayings of the Week, 15 May 1982))

Beware of the bald-heads of the law, for there are two men whom you should never go to Court against unless you are dragged there; one is he who has more money than you have, and the other is he who has no money at all. With the former you may lose even if you are in the right, and with the latter you will lose even if you win.

(Australianus (pseudonym of K.J. Back), ‘Law’, The Royal Toast, 1920)