John Halden Wootten AC QC (19 December 1922 – 27 July 2021) was an Australian lawyer and legal academic and the founder of the University of New South Wales Faculty of Law, of which he was the Foundation Chair and its inaugural Dean.
[2] John Halden Wootten was born to a lower-middle-class[3] family of dairy farmers from the North Coast region of New South Wales and is of English descent.
[7][8] During his university studies, and interested in languages but dissuaded by his teacher-turned-school principal paternal uncle,[1] Wootten commenced working at the State Crown Solicitor's Office.
[2] Wootten has been involved in the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody,[12] and the Australian Conservation Foundation, as its president,[1] among other causes.
[13][14] Following Rupert Murdoch's takeover of The Herald and Weekly Times and a decision from the 15-member council against calling on the Commonwealth Government for an independent tribunal to vet proposed media takeovers[15] and in light of the council's failure to object to Murdoch's control of 70% of Australia's print media and the sense that both of these events were wrong and unjust, Wootten resigned in protest,[16] alongside John Lawrence, a former federal president of the Australian Journalists Association.
The Federal Treasurer could stop the takeover if he wanted to … in this case it is a man who has renounced his citizenship to further his worldwide media power, and who makes no secret of the fact that he intends to make personal use of his control of newspapers.In 1990 Wootten was appointed Companion of the Order of Australia (AC) for "service to human rights, to conservation, to legal education and to the law".