Shirley Smith by Sarah Gaitanos

Shirley Smith by Sarah Gaitanos

Author:Sarah Gaitanos
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Victoria University Press
Published: 2020-07-15T00:00:00+00:00


17

Going solo

IN 1959 SHIRLEY added Constitutional Law to the subjects she taught and, together with tutorials and editing Victoria’s Law Review, it all added up to a full-time position. For the first time in her life she was earning decent money and could put some aside in savings.

Roman Law was dropped from the curriculum at the end of 1959. To mark its passing she threw a toga party, but she was sorry to see it go. She explained to Hugo Manson:

Roman Law is the basis of the Civil Law which they have in most of Europe and in Scotland and in many ways it’s a much more rational approach than the Common Law, which is severely pragmatic and not always worked out on the best intellectual grounds. The Common Law tradition is terribly proud of itself. You’ll find judges in England and here, or certainly in England, panegyrising Common Law and what a wonderful heritage it is, and so on, and young students who came straight to it from school kind of swallow all this uncritically. . . . I think it has impoverished the degree to take Roman Law out of it.1

As a lecturer at Victoria, Shirley found none of the sexual discrimination she had experienced at Auckland in the 1940s, with the exception of the law faculty dinner. The ban on women had been re-imposed. Once again she fought that and had the rule reversed.

Later, running her own practice as a barrister and solicitor in an almost wholly male domain, Shirley would find it much harder to get the Wellington District Law Society to include women at their dinners. As her colleague Jim Thomson saw it, the law dinner wasn’t just a question of sexism for Shirley. She was asserting the kind of lawyer she was, not just a wallflower but ‘one of you guys’.2 Her tenacity paid off, but it took years.

Meanwhile her father kept telling her to ‘come down from the ivory tower’, that she was getting old and she had to find out before it was too late what it really was to be a lawyer. ‘He told me that I should “earn my spurs in the heat and dust of the forum”, a mixed metaphor which I understood to mean that I should return to the practice of the law, particularly in the courts.’3 She thought he was right and decided to give up the security of her university work and set up her own law practice. Sir David explained in his memoir: ‘. . . she wanted to show that a woman could practise law on her own account and employ others to assist her instead of simply being employed as a law lecturer by a University or as a lawyer by a Government Department or large legal firm with the consequent advantage of a regular salary cheque.’4

But she didn’t want to be stereotyped as a women’s lawyer. As a student she had excelled at writing opinions in international and constitutional law and she loved the analytical thinking involved.



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