- May I begin by talking about my recent visit to Merthyr Tydfil. You may wonder why. It was on the occasion of the visit of Chief Justice Robert French, the Chief Justice of the High Court of Australia. The visit was in honour of Sir Samuel Griffith, the first Chief Justice of Australia, who was born there in 1845. He was a lawyer and a politician who played a critical role drafting the new constitution that Australia developed to turn the then colonies into a federal state, and thereafter in the creation and success of the High Court. Here was a great Welshman who had done a great deal outside Wales.
- But then one also saw in Merthyr, and what was equally important, was what needed to be done in a city that had been the cradle of much of the industrial revolution, much of that now forgotten. Instead a terrible decline and a terrible lack of prosperity. That second thought should turn us to looking at actually what the law can do for Wales, not only by inspiration from the past, but by looking at the future and at the prosperity of Wales. This is something which really ought to govern all our discussions and ought to be the future focus of Legal Wales"¦"¦