Abstract
We were so sad to hear that the Honourable Sally Brown AM died on 21 March 2025. In a long career Sally Brown held many roles, including solicitor, barrister, educator, magistrate and judge. She became the Chief Magistrate in 1990 – the first woman to lead a Victorian Court. She then became a judge of the Family Court in 1993. In more recent years she gave her expertise to many boards including the Alfred Hospital, the Australian Institute of Criminology, the Australian Institute of Judicial Administration, the Australian Drug and Alcohol Foundation, the International Commission of Jurists (Victorian Chapter) and the National Judicial College of Australia. Her obituary from the Victorian Bar (dated 24 March 2025) observed that Sally was a ‘passionate advocate for the reform of laws relating to family violence and juvenile justice [and] was instrumental in the development of judicial education programs.’ Her extraordinary legal career has been documented in many tributes, but we want to address our comments to Sally’s extraordinary generosity in two academic projects in which we were involved.
The Australian Feminist Judgments Project
Sally was both a mentor and advisor on the Australian Feminist Judgments Project – a project that collected together 25 judgments rewritten by a group of academics and others through a feminist lens. Throughout this project, Sally attended and took part in workshops; she read almost every judgment and engaged with all the authors. In their acknowledgements to the published collection – Australian Feminist Judgments: Righting and Rewriting Law (Hart, 2014) – editors Heather Douglas, Francesca Bartlett, Trish Luker and Rosemary Hunter described Sally’s feedback as ‘warm and generous’. For Nicole, who was then a junior scholar, the experience of attending a workshop with talented, senior colleagues was daunting. However, Sally was so kind and supportive in her feedback that Nicole quickly overcame her unease. In writing a heartfelt foreword to the collection, Sally observed: ‘Judges write and their words change the lives of those before them and, sometimes, the lives of countless others’. No doubt this was true for her own judgments. The last sentence of her foreword also captured her joyous attitude to work and life, where she said: ‘[f]inally (and perhaps heretically), read these judgments … for fun. Parody, imagination and the critique of law have rarely merged so seamlessly.’
The Indigenous Judgments Project
Sally also worked with us on the Indigenous Judgments Project which resulted in 16 judgments retold through an Indigenous lens. Again, Sally generously attended a second round of workshops in Sydney and Brisbane to discuss the planned judgments. For Nicole, this was a difficult time because her father had recently passed on. Sally was sensitive to her loss and kindly reminded her that ‘you are never too old to grieve a parent’.
As was so typical of her approach, she went above and beyond, providing individualised feedback to many of the authors. Sally worked closely with some in an iterative way, sharing versions of judgments back and forth to deal with gnarly issues that initially seemed impossible but, with her exceptional intellect, were expertly navigated. She was sensitive to the context in which many of the Indigenous authors were writing, understanding the trauma many authors faced in rewriting stories close to them. We, as editors, wrote in our acknowledgment to the published collection – Indigenous Legal Judgments: Bringing Indigenous Voices into Judicial Decision Making (Routledge, 2021) – thanking Sally for her ‘inspiring contribution’.
Sally was the perfect mentor for these two projects. Her skills were well-honed through her trailblazing interventions in judicial education – getting judges to think about gender and culture and the impact of family violence. Sally was an inspiration to us. She showed us how to take our work seriously but at the same time to constantly find joy – we loved the fact that our email communications to her were always to her email address: ‘sallyinparis’.
We take the liberty of reprinting here part of the Obituary written by Sally’s close friends (Jenny Morgan, Therese McCarthy, Melanie Young, Reg Graycar and Colleen Moore) and published in The Age newspaper on 26 March 2025: A pioneering feminist lawyer, Sally was steadfast in her commitment to justice, especially for women and children. A wise decision-maker, leader, administrator, teacher and thinker who delighted in literature, especially poetry, music, art, history, cooking, wine and Paris. Graceful and discerning, courageous and kind, loyal and full of wit, Sally brought style and substance to all she did. She excelled at friendship – generous, wise, and unwavering. We will miss her laughter, her intellect and good judgment, and her boundless heart.