of Jeffery Hart Bent. For two years the judicial interregnum lasted, and Bent, the first Supreme Court Judge of Australia, never heard a cause nor delivered a judgment.
It is difficult to say what other course he could have followed. Diplomacy and conciliatory speech might have done much, but the Governor would only have been satisfied by Crosley's admission, and it was the Governor who was Bent's real antagonist. Had the judge given way and admitted Crosley, the principle of the admission of emancipist attorneys would have been established, and there is no reason to believe that the Colonial Office would have interfered afterwards to reverse it.[1] Yet even Riley saw that he had committed an error of judgment. "I am compelled to admit," he said, "that during this period[2] I had occasion to observe that numbers of the very class of men [whose cause] I had strenuously advocated, acted with so little consideration towards each other during the suspension of the law, and took such advantage of the merchants and those to whom they were indebted, that I could not but regret the line I had pursued."[3] He would not say definitely that the admission of emancipists would have been actually mischievous, but only that it was "advantageous to the territory that there are sufficient free solicitors … to enable the courts to proceed without resorting to that necessity," and that it was "desirable that not any persons should now officiate in the courts, who have not gone free to the Colony".
Amongst the convict and emancipist population the emancipist attorneys had considerable popularity. This was born partly of long intimacy and private association, but it was increased by the mode they adopted of charging their clients. The emancipist attorney took a percentage on the amount recovered in place of ordinary fees, and was therefore willing to undertake risky suits at no expense to his clients. So long as the fees of the courts went to the judges this practice was to their advantage also, for certainly it augmented the number of cases brought before them![4]
