Nebraska State Bar Foundation

Justice Kirby Lecture

The Roman L. Hruska Institute for the Administration of Justice was pleased to host The Honorable Michael D. Kirby, retired Justice of the Australian High Court. On September 22, 2009, Justice Kirby presented "Citations of Foreign and International Law in Constitutional Decision-making" at the UNL College of Law in a lecture open to the public.

Justice Kirby was born in Sydney, Australia, March 18, 1939. He holds the degrees BA LLM BEc from Sydney University. The degree of LLM was conferred on him with First Class Honors.

He first practiced as a solicitor and a barrister before being appointed as the Deputy President of the Australian Conciliation and Arbitration Commission in 1974. In 1983, Kirby was appointed as a Judge on the Federal Court of Australia, and in 1984, he was appointed as President of the New South Wales Court of Appeal. He was concurrently appointed to the post of President of the Court of Appeal of the Solomon Islands in 1995, and in 1996 he was appointed to the High Court of Australia where he served as a Justice until his retirement on February 2, 2009.

Justice Kirby served as Deputy Chancellor of the University of Newcastle beginning in 1978 until his election as Chancellor of the Macquarie University in 1984, a position that he held until 1993.

He has also been active in international activities. Justice Kirby served as chairman of two OECD Expert Groups, privacy (1978-80) and data security (1991-92). From 1995-2005, he served on the International Bioethics Committee of UNESCO where in 2004-5 he chaired the group that drafted the Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights, which was adopted by the General Conference of UNESCO in 2005.

Justice Kirby was an active member, Chairman, and President of the International Commission of Jurists. He also served as Special Representative of the Secretary-General of the United Nations for Human Rights in Cambodia between 1993 and 1996.

Justice Ginsburg Lecture

The Roman L. Hruska Institute was pleased to host United States Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who spoke in Lincoln on April 7, 2006, at the University of Nebraska College of Law. Her lecture was titled, "Maintaining the Independence of the U.S. Judiciary." Please see the Omaha World Herald article.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg was born in Brooklyn, New York, March 15, 1933. She married Martin D. Ginsburg in 1954, has a daughter, Jane, and a son, James. She received her B.A. from Cornell University, attended Harvard Law School, and received her LL.B from Columbia Law School.

Ginsburg served as a law clerk to the Honorable Edmund L. Palmieri, Judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, from 1959-1961. From 1961-1963, she was a research associate and then associate director of the Columbia Law School Project on International Procedure. She was a Professor of Law at Rutgers University School of Law from 1963-1972, and Columbia Law School from 1972-1980, and a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Stanford, California from 1977-1978.

In 1971, she was instrumental in launching the Women’s Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union, and served as the ACLU’s General Counsel from 1973-1980, and on the National Board of Directors from 1974-1980.

Ginsburg was appointed a Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in 1980. President Clinton nominated her as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, and she took her seat August 10, 1993.

Justice Ginsburg Lecture Picture Gallery

About the Institute

The Roman L. Hruska Institute for the Administration of Justice was established in 1995 to "educate lawyers, law students, and the public-at-large in Nebraska to the importance of the administration of justice, particularly at the federal level through the conduct of symposia or lectures." In planning the symposia or lectures funded by the Institute, a special effort is made to reflect the issues and activities to which Senator Roman L. Hruska devoted his professional and Congressional career.

The Institute recognizes the career of the late Senator Hruska who served as United States Senator for Nebraska from 1954 to 1977, and who participated prominently in efforts to enhance the administration of justice in the Federal Courts. His contributions to the law include many of the crime control reform acts of the 1970's.

The Hruska Institute is a joint effort of the Nebraska State Bar Foundation and the University of Nebraska College of Law.