The ACT's former chief justice says he would have been forced to convict at least some of the Ballarat goldminers turned revolutionaries on the facts of the cases brought against them after the abortive goldfields uprising of 1854.

But Mr Higgins, who retired from the territory's Supreme Court bench in September, will tell the audience at this year's Eureka Lecture at the Canberra Irish Club on Wednesday that he is glad the post-Eureka trials ended in acquittals, despite the ''obvious guilt'' of some of the defendants.

The long-serving chief justice, an active member of the capital's Irish community, said he had studied the paper of the trials of 13 mostly Irish miners in Melbourne before another chief justice and Irishman, Redmond Barry.

''There were a few arguments their barristers very cleverly thought up, but they really weren't likely to have succeeded at any other time,'' Mr Higgins said. ''Some of them might have been a bit difficult but I suspect a lot of them, as a matter of strict law, would have to have been convicted.

''Trouble is, the punishment for sedition was death.''

In his lecture, Eureka and the Rule of Law, Mr Higgins will talk about how the Melbourne jurors in the 1855 trial of the diggers formed the last-ditch defence against the abuse of authority, a lesson that remains useful even after nearly 158 years.

''The governor was so unpopular and the regime of the governor was regarded with such disfavour,'' the former Chief Justice said.

''The jurors weren't working men, they were middle-class men who owned property, yet even they were not prepared to convict anybody. They felt the governor was being tyrannical and oppressive and they weren't prepared to stand for it.

''What that tells us about the rule of law is that we have a whole range of protections, even beyond the judiciary; in cases of this kind, we have the jury. So, I'll be saying that if we want to keep these protections, they have to be cherished.''

The 18th Annual Eureka Dinner Lecture, held by the Canberra Friends of Ireland Society, is on Wednesday evening at the Canberra Irish Club, Weston.