Justice Richard Refshauge is summing up on Ben Jefferson Salmon, QC, who is retiring after 50 years of legal practice, the overwhelming bulk of it at the Canberra bar.

Salmon is quick to point out he has actually been working in the law for some 60 years, having started in his father's office in Sydney at the age of 15.

Salmon's many close connections and long experience allow the capital's longest-practising silk a unique vision into the law and its many changes across the decades.

When it is suggested that practice must have been much tougher in the 1950s and 1960s (without having case law and statute at the touch of a tablet while on one's feet in court), Salmon is quick to disagree.

"There weren't nearly so many [statutes]," he says. "Everything was pretty simple. You learned it at law school and it didn't change so much."

He does not spare the legislators. "I think they're very inept," he says. "Just for the sake of being able to say they've done something, they change things that don't need changing. And worst of all is the ACT."

Canberra operated on the NSW Crimes Act up until the 1940s. Between the '40s and 1965, Canberra ordinances, made by a federal minister or Cabinet, occupied two whole volumes.

"A [Crimes Act] section that was amended in NSW for good reason, they wouldn't amend the same section," Salmon says, with whole slabs of legislation being written anew for the ACT.

"And that was the Commonwealth days, of course," he said. "It's worse now [since self-government]."

Salmon's views on other legislative directions, both Commonwealth and state, are equally blunt.

On terrorism, he notes wryly that the Citizenship Act already dealt with much that is being agitated. "That's just typical," he said. "I don't think there are public servants with long memories any more."

Mandatory sentencing "is of course, just completely absurd", with governments backing off only because jails were over capacity and "it's costing too much".

One-punch laws (where NSW provides eight years in prison if a victim dies, regardless of circumstances): "What gets me is that these people who hound the attorney-general and the courts, the legal profession … if it was the son of such a person who'd been charged because he'd had too much to drink, I think they might change their mind.

"The holier-than-thou people really don't think about the full effect of what they're asking for."

After completing his articles in Griffith, NSW, Salmon came to Canberra to take up a position with Dave Crossin, a pioneer and leader of the Canberra profession, who died in May this year, within days of Ken Jacobs, the former High Court judge, for whom Salmon was associate when Jacobs was on the NSW Supreme Court.

In an interview, Salmon was always mentioning others, with great generosity and intimate recall in a catalogue not just of the Canberra legal milieu, but of the nation's.

Salmon was in the thick of it himself, appearing on occasions on a pro bono basis, before six Chief Justices of Australia, from Sir Garfield Barwick (1964-1981) to Murray Gleeson (1998-2008), with whom he had been at Sydney University Law School, as well as the later High Court judge Michael Kirbyand the future prime minister John Howard.

While quick to stress no direct political affiliation, Salmon was well plugged in across the political divide, having been in chambers with the federal Labor frontbencher Kep Enderby and in practice with Crossin, whose erstwhile partner John Haslem, knocked Enderby out of the seat of Canberra for the Liberals in the 1975 landslide to Malcolm Fraser.

And there were more and more connections, many beyond the law, Salmon showing himself pictured with the veteran psephologist Malcolm Mackerras in a snap of the third NSW Regiment of well over a half-century ago, and noting his simultaneous presence at the prestigious Shore school in Sydney with the three-time Wimbledon tennis champion John Newcombe. (Salmon proudly recalled also that while "Newk" had won his colours coat at school for five straight years, Salmon's father had won his (in cricket) for six.

Going even further back, Salmon is a member of a gang of five from the Gordon Public School, including a Federal Court judge and the prominent architect Philip Cox, who still meet for lunch.

Salmon's "genuine love of the law", as noted by barrister James Sabharwal, had a heavy emphasis on access to justice, a matter recorded also by Justice Refshauge, who has described the QC as "one of our great unsung heroes".

"He's a great advocate and a great fighter for the rights of the people," Justice Refshauge said.

Salmon was one of only a handful of Public Defenders in the short period up to just after self-government that the territory provided for the position, with Justice Refshauge saying it was Salmon who really entrenched the role in the public mind.

Law Society president Martin Hockridge particularly mentioned Salmon's fearlessness, perhaps a result of his having been a contemporary, if not the senior, of many of those he appeared before.

"I think because of his standing, the judges were going to accept what he had to say, or at least going to listen to what he had to say …", Hockridge said. "He had this incredible capacity to go the heart of the issue straight away ...

"Other counsel will run down every rabbit hole in the hope that something's going to stick at the end of the day, but Ben would be more inclined to say, 'Let's mention that in the periphery' and let it go."

A great mentor, Salmon had formed The Champagne Club, which convened on Friday afternoons and openly reviewed the week's cases and the performances of various players in them.

"While Legal Aid was a social place, that was a very social occasion," Hockridge said. "He was very effusive in his comments on judges, prosecutors and others."

Salmon believed in the Public Defender position, and he believes in legal aid more generally, notwithstanding the increasing media criticism of it – and the government acquiescence in cutting funding for it.

"It's disgraceful," he said. "It's the easiest part of Commonwealth and state funding to be taken away because it can be characterised as 'giving money to criminals'.

"They forget that a lot of it goes to deserving people, particularly women, in unpleasant domestic situations. The actual cost to the courts of unrepresented people is far greater than what they think they're saving."

At one time, the ACT Government wanted to convert both the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions and Legal Aid into "branches of the [Attorney-General's] department". Salmon, then president of the Bar Association, along with Robert Clynes, then president of the Law Society, went into battle, organising a group - including the Civil Liberties Council and the Police Association – to fight the move.

"It never went ahead," Salmon records directly.

Hockridge recalls Salmon's 22 years on the Law Council of Australia's Access to Justice committee, representing the ACT Bar.

Many of the murder matters Salmon took on were Legal Aid cases, a practical demonstration of his commitment to access to justice. His murder cases with Hockridge instructing included the infamous Del Castillo case, pitching Salmon against Ken Crispin, SC, just before the latter's elevation to the Supreme Court bench.

"I think, forensically speaking, Ben won the day," Hockridge said.

Another Salmon client, one of four co-accused, was successful in the long-running "Saudi Bill" murder trial.

Salmon's defence work extends beyond court too, the QC, seemingly alone among the profession on some occasions, speaking out publicly in defence of matters of law.

He wrote to The Canberra Times last year in defence of long-serving magistrate Peter Dingwall, who was briefly and unsuccessfully under siege from the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions.

The matter was highly irregular, with the magistrate having criticised the office's practice in a particular case, a not uncommon exchange from bench to bar table.

However, on this occasion, the office hit back with an application to the Chief Magistrate to have Magistrate Dingwall removed from the matter.

"That was just idiocy," Salmon recalls, offending against not only common sense and normal practice but hitting at the independence of the judiciary.

"One judge can't stop another judge sitting," Salmon said. "It was designed only in an attempt to embarrass him. It was totally misconceived … I was beside myself with rage."

As well as access to justice generally, Salmon is pleased to have been associated with a time when women came more comprehensively into senior legal roles.

Again, he has many connections: the first female High Court judge Mary Gaudron, the former Senate president Margaret Reid, the first female District and Supreme Court judge in NSW Jane Matthews (with whom he was at law school) and the first woman to be a judge, Queen's Counsel, State Governor and Australian university chancellor, Dame Roma Mitchell (known through shared service on the Australian Bar Association Council).

He recalls being bested in an early meeting with the advocate Priscilla Flemming, who would take silk in the same year as Salmon, in 1985. It was on the steps of a court on the far South Coast with trucks roaring past, and Salmon was very confident of his case and thinking little would change in talks with the other side.

"After a very short discussion, I had to tell my client to give up," he said simply.

In retirement, Salmon will have more time to devote to his other loves of horses and history. His wife, Margot, combined those two passions in a picture of the grave of Copenhagen, Lord Wellington's horse. Salmon is keen to see the reputation of Wellington, in this the 200th anniversary of his victory over Napoleon at Waterloo, elevated to match the reverence for Lord Nelson, whose column towers over Trafalgar Square.

While there are horses to tend on his South Coast property, Salmon is expected to keep up his comprehensive connections in the capital.

As Hockridge puts it, "He just knows so many people. With lots of people it's just name dropping, but Ben actually knows all of these people and just matter of factly reels off the associations, a Who's Who of the legal profession in Australia."

Those connections might even continue to be oiled over the occasional brief working luncheon with the odd judge, magistrate or other legal type on Salmon's Canberra sojourns, reviewing the progress of various prosecutors, legislators and others in the world he strode with such impact for half a century.

* Andrew Fraser is a criminal and traffic lawyer with Armstrong Legal.