Thomson Reuters is pleased to announce the appointment of the Hon Justice Stephen Estcourt as the Section Editor for a brand new Tasmania Section in The Australian Law Journal.
Justice Escourt was appointed as a Magistrate in 1990, after 15 years as a barrister and solicitor with the firm of Archer Bushby in Launceston. He left the Court in 1994 to establish the Resource Management and Planning Appeal Tribunal for the Tasmanian Government. After 2 years as the inaugural Chair of that body he resigned to join the Tasmanian Independent Bar in late 1995.
Justice Estcourt took silk in 1998 and as a Queens Counsel practiced extensively in the civil and criminal jurisdictions of the Supreme Court of Tasmania and in the Federal and High Courts of Australia. Justice Estcourt was President of the Law Society of Tasmania in 1988 and between 2003 and 2007 was President of the Tasmanian Independent Bar. In 2006 he was elected President of the Australian Bar Association, a position he held until January 2008. Justice Estcourt signed the Victorian Bar Roll in September 2004. By the end of 2011, he was a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Law.
In 2001 Justice Estcourt was appointed a part-time Deputy President of the Commonwealth Administrative Appeals Tribunal and sat all over Australia hearing chiefly visa refusal and deportation cases. He left the AAT in 2004 as a result of philosophical objections to Attorney General Philip Ruddock’s apparent oversight and appointment practices.
In March 2013, the Attorney General of Tasmania, Brian Wightman, announced Justice Estcourt’s appointment as a Puisne Judge of the Supreme Court of Tasmania.
Justice Estcourt’s updates from Tasmania will be of great benefit to readers of The Australian Law Journal and we take great pleasure in welcoming him to the team.
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