Even back in the 1980s, Virginia Bell was a champion of the underdog. Will the environment benefit from her outlook?

The first time I remember making a connection between food and fuel was watching Anik Szapiro sniff butane at the Redfern Legal Centre, in Sydney, when I was a young law student working as a volunteer legal assistant. 

Anik was a confirmed street person, and could annoy considerably. Butane seemed to serve as his answer to morning tea.

Pity would usually keep us from from getting yelling at Anik, even when he bothered us. But we also knew that the sharp lawyer under a pile of papers at the back of the office would not tolerate anyone taking the mickey out of him.

I have written elsewhere of Anik, but not before of the sharp lawyer, Virginia Bell.

She comes to mind because, effective today, Virginia Bell becomes the newest justice on the High Court of Australia. Though she was a criminal law specialist at the time I knew her, she now joins the High Court in interpreting a raft of laws that will govern the complex world of environmental law as we enter a new era of in national and international relations and scientific progress driven by the prospect of climate change.

Hers was the “ugly work of progress” to use Rob Elam’s memorable phrase — making sure tenants were not thrown out of their flats without due process, defending poor indigenous Australians in criminal procedures, making sure old people had a will before they died.

Taking wills to be signed by old people on their death beds was one of my duties, and it was as good an introduction to the practical work of social action as I could have designed or imagined.

No one at the Centre made anywhere near decent money, and how Virginia paid her bills I have no idea. But she ran a good place of simple justice that is hard to forget for all those who worked there.

The Law of the Sea seems like an abstraction until one considers the massive potential of tidal energy, or the clean up of massive algae blooms in the Gulf of Mexico. The laws of negligence and torts seem the obscure stuff of car accident trials, until one considers the potential litigation over carbon impact. Can a condo developer sue a coal-fired power plant for contributing to putting an expensive slab of waterfront property underwater?  Who can be sued for damages for acid rain blown by the trade winds. Can international climate treaties govern local laws? Indeed these are complex times for high court justices.

But it is such a good sign that decisions like these will be the hands of people like Virginia Bell. Or rather, Ms. Justice Bell, one of the last, best defenders of the underdog.