Education
Lasry graduated from Monash University in Melbourne. He attended Military Commission hearings at Guantanamo Bay in August 2004 and March 2007.
Lasry graduated from Monash University in Melbourne. He attended Military Commission hearings at Guantanamo Bay in August 2004 and March 2007.
Barrister and advocate
He was admitted to practise law in Victoria in 1973 and was appointed Queens Counsel in 1990. Lasry has acted as a junior consel before the Costigan royal commission, counsel with the National Crime Authority, and was the Royal Commissioner for the Inquiry into the Victorian Metropolitan Ambulance Service. Between 2003 and 2006 Lasry acted as senior counsel assisting the Coronial inquiry into the 2003 Canberra bushfires.
Prior to his 2007 appointment to the bench, Lasry was entitled to practise law in the Australian jurisdictions of Victoria, New South Wales, the Northern Territory, Queensland, South Australia, and Western Australia.
The former chair of the Victorian Criminal Bar Association, in August 2004 Lasry was appointed as the independent observer representing the Law Council of Australia at the trial of Australian Guantanamo Bay detainee David Hicks. As a senior partner with Slater & Gordon, Lasry has acted as defence counsel in several high-profile criminal cases in Australia and overseas.
He acted on behalf of Joseph Thomas in a high-profile Australian terror trial (see R v Thomas) in which Thomas was convicted of receiving funds from a terrorist organisation and for passport offences. The conviction was overturned on appeal.
Lasry represented Van Tuong Nguyen in the high-profile case in which Van Nguyen was convicted of drug trafficking in Singapore in 2002 and executed in December 2005.
At about that time Lasry took up the case of Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran, two of the nine Australians convicted of drug trafficking in Indonesia, known as the Bali Nine. That work has been continued by barrister Julian McMahon and a team of Victorian lawyers. Appointment to the bench
Lasry was appointed as a justice of the Supreme Court of Victoria on 23 October 2007.
He also chaired appellate hearings for the Confederation of Australian Motor Sport (CAMS) and for V8 Supercar racing, and holds a motor racing licence.
He was the trial judge for the murder trial against Hugo Alastair Rich and the re-trial of Robert Farquharson. And from a legal viewpoint, it has no deterrent value." In 2015, Lasry organised a concert in support of jailed Australian journalist Peter Greste.
He is a longtime supporter of the Street Kilda Football Club and, in 2011, was appointed to serve a three-year term on the Faculty Board of the Faculty of Law at Monash University.
He is also a member of the Council of the International Criminal Bar for counsel practising before the International Court of Justice.