ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the first or ‘maiden’ judgments handed down by women judges who comprised the first iteration of near parity on the High Court of Australia. The focus here is on the relationship between practices of authorship—understood in other institutional contexts as the division of labour—and prevailing notions of judicial collegiality. I argue that a judge’s first judgment is a useful way of situating a discussion about women judges’ contributions vis-à-vis difference by querying the extent to which the woman judge can ever shake-off her status as the ‘maiden’ bound to conform for the sake of comity. The first judgments, understood as an informal welcoming ritual, are revealing as markers of building a culture of consensus and collaboration rather than as the particularities of legal reasoning adopted in any of the specific cases. Understood in light of contemporaneous debates about (gendered) questions of authorship, authority and collaboration, this chapter provides some insights into how women are situated as legal knowers.
