This is the third series in the annual Menzies Lecture series. The lectures were delivered at the University of Virginia and at William and Mary College Williamsburg on 8 and 12 October 1987.

It is a great privilege for me to be here today at this College, which had become distinguished as a seat of learning long before my own country had first been settled by English-speaking people. The occasion for my presence is to deliver one of a series of lectures given in honour of Sir Robert Gordon Menzies, who was Prime Minister of Australia from 1949 to 1966 and who, more relevantly for today’s occasion, was both a distinguished constitutional lawyer and a lover of Virginia.

The theory of Montesquieu, that to secure liberty it is necessary to separate the three main functions of the state — the legislative, the executive and the judicial — has had a profound and lasting influence on political thought. James Madison, who expounded the theory with such effect in No. 47 of The Federalist papers, regarded the separation of powers as the most sacred principle of the United States Constitution.

The High Court . . . is properly termed the “keystone of the federal arch”.

— Alfred Deakin

take it as an incontrovertible axiom that responsible government is to be the keystone of this federal arch.

— Isaac Isaacs