David Hammerschlag was born in Johannesburg, South Africa. The city grew rapidly after gold-bearing rock was discovered on the Witwatersrand ridge in 1886, and its economy and institutions developed around the mining industry.
He completed his university studies in Johannesburg before moving to Australia in 1986, a move that began a legal career in New South Wales.
Hammerschlag studied at the University of Witwatersrand, where he received a Bachelor of Arts in 1974 and a Bachelor of Laws in 1977. The university originated in 1896 as the South African School of Mines in Kimberley, moved to Johannesburg in 1904 and received full university status in 1922.
The university has its roots in the mining industry, as does Johannesburg itself. Its legal training therefore developed in a city whose commercial and professional life was closely tied to the gold-mining economy of the Witwatersrand.
Hammerschlag performed two years of compulsory military service in the South African Defence Force, the national armed force of South Africa before 1994, including a period as a military law advisor who appeared in courts martial. He was called to the South African Bar in 1982.
He moved to Australia in 1986 and re-qualified in New South Wales through the Solicitors Admission Board examinations. He was admitted in New South Wales in 1987 and joined Freehill Hollingdale & Page, a Sydney firm whose origins lay in the practice Bernard Austin Freehill established in 1871. The firm took the name Freehill Hollingdale & Page in 1947 and, in 1978, became the first major Australian law firm to appoint a female partner.
A 2007 address at his swearing-in recalled that, in his first months at the firm, he appeared alone as a solicitor against both senior and junior counsel. He was admitted to the partnership in 1988 and remained a partner until he was called to the New South Wales Bar in 1991.
The chambers he joined, 11 St James Hall, was established in 1991 and formally opened later that year by Chief Justice Murray Gleeson. Hammerschlag was a founder member of the chambers and later its chairman. He took silk in 2000 and practised in major commercial disputes and white-collar criminal prosecutions, and he appeared in the HIH and Orange Grove Royal Commissions. The HIH inquiry followed the collapse of the insurer HIH in 2001.
He was sworn in as a judge of the Supreme Court of New South Wales on 30 January 2007 and initially sat in the General List of the Equity Division. He was appointed Corporations List Judge in 2008 and became head of the Commercial List and the Technology and Construction List in 2009. The Supreme Court is the highest state court of New South Wales.
In March 2022 he became a Judge of Appeal and Chief Judge in Equity, succeeding Julie Ward, who had become President of the Court of Appeal. He has also written a practical guide to commercial court proceedings in New South Wales, published by LexisNexis Butterworths in 2022.
(Second edition of a practical guide to proceedings in the...)
2022
