Due to the COVID-19 restrictions we have regretfully decided to postpone this event and our other large events in April. We hope to reschedule later in the year.
Those who have already booked will receive a full refund.
In 2020 we are delighted to announce that the A G L Shaw lecturer will be leading legal history scholar, Dr Simon Smith AM FRHSV, who recently published Solicitors and the Law Institute in Victoria 1835-2019: Pathway to a Respected Profession.
Alan George Lewers Shaw AO, FAHA, FASSA, FRAHS, FRHSV (1916 – 2012) was an RHSV Councillor from 1965 to 1971 and President from 1987 to 1991. He is also a Benefactor of the Royal Historical Society of Victoria. He was President of the C J La Trobe Society as well and the two organisations, the C J La Trobe Society and the RHSV, have jointly presented the annual A G L Shaw lecture since 2002 as a tribute to a great historian.
Simon Smith is an Adjunct Professor with the Sir Zelman Cowen Centre at Victoria University. He was Vice-President of the RHSV in 2009-2011. In 2016 he edited Judging for the People: A Social History of the Supreme Court in Victoria 1841-2016.
His other recent published works include Barristers Solicitors Pettifoggers: Profiles in Australian Colonial Legal History (2014) and Maverick Litigants: A History of Vexatious Litigants in Australia 1930-2008 (2009).
As a Monash University law undergraduate in the 1970s, Simon helped establish Australia’s first community legal centre, the Springvale Legal Service. In that context he was a founding editor of a leading practice text, the Lawyers Practice Manual (Vic). After completing his legal training in Oxford, he was admitted to practice in 1975. In 1978 he became the first full-time clinical legal education academic in Australia, based at Springvale.
Through that clinical programme, for a decade, he helped introduce Monash undergraduates to the practice of law in a supervised poverty law setting. Over 40 years of that programme, the power of ‘first impressions’ on those future practitioners has contributed to the better practice of law in Australia.
In the 1980s, Simon was a pioneer in alternative dispute resolution and was the first Ombudsman in the Australian financial services sector. In 1991 he helped establish the Society of Consumer Affairs Professionals in Business (SOCAP). He was President in 1996. Later he was Senior Counsel with a top-500 insurance company and a curator of the nationally significant insurance archive, the Suncorp Insurance Archive, now in the hands of the State Library of Victoria.
Simon holds the degrees of B Juris. LL M and PhD from Monash University. In the 2019 Australia Day honours he was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia for significant service to the law particularly in consumer affairs, to higher education, and to history.
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office@historyvictoria.org.au 
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