The University of Adelaide, Research Unit for the Study of Society, Law and Religion (RUSSLR) invites you to a Public Lecture:

“The Religious Writings of Sir Richard Hanson, Second Chief Justice of South Australia”

When: Tuesday, 10 April 2012 at 12 noon
Where: Moot Court Room, Ligertwood Building, Law School

Speaker: Dr Greg Taylor is currently completing a biography of Sir Richard Hanson, shortly to be published with Federation Press. He has written widely on the history of the law of South Australia in the nineteenth century. He is currently an Associate Professor at Monash University’s Faculty of Law.

Synopsis: Sir Richard Hanson was one of the co-founders of South Australia and its second Chief Justice (1861 – 1876). He was also a self-taught intellectual who published four books on religious topics : in the early 1860s he attempted to reconcile the discoveries of science with religion, but by the late 1860s he had lost the protestant dissenting faith in which he grew up and wrote lives of Jesus and St Paul in the modernist fashion, assuming no supernatural or miraculous content and treating the events solely as occurrences in human history. Although he was an amateur in this field, his books were reasonably well reviewed by the experts. In his writing, he was clearly influenced by the judicial method. This talk will trace Sir Richard Hanson’s loss of faith, place it in the broader context of events at the time as well as his own biography and show how he transposed the judicial method into the field which he entered as an amateur.

For further information, please see the attached flyer