NSW Law Reports

Sir James Dowling was the second Chief Justice of New South Wales. In 2005, more than 160 years after he died in office in 1844, the Francis Forbes Society for Australian Legal History published, as Dowling's Select Cases 1828-1844, his reports of 465 of the many cases he heard. He had himself intended to publish these cases, which were preserved relatively untouched in nine manuscript notebooks in the State archives, as Australia's first set of law reports.

Dowling's Select Cases 1828-1844 is a single volume edited by Tim Castle, former Deputy Chairperson of the Council of Law Reporting, and Macquarie University's Professor Bruce Kercher. It stands as an important source of legal authority in relation to topics of current relevance, including the restraint of executive and judicial power, the foundations of our commercial and civil law, and early criminal law and procedure, as well as specialist topics of relevance to defamation lawyers and admiralty practitioners. To take but one example, Chadley v Wyatt [No 1] (1835) NSW Sel. Cas. (Dowling) 669 was a case in which a civil jury was discharged after several of the jurors attended an out-of-hours view of disputed building works, without the sanction of the Court.

As the Honourable J Spigelman, AC, Chief Justice of NSW, wrote in his Foreword to the volume, "The cases reported here apply legal principles and manifest a style of reasoning of which we are the direct inheritors today. Many of the principles have not changed at all. Many of the cases would be decided in exactly the same way. The cases manifest, however, one abiding theme: the omnipresence of continuity and change."