[1][2] Justice Hope received his Bachelor of Laws from the University of Sydney before being called to the New South Wales Bar on 26 October 1945.

During his time at university he had attempted to join the Communist Party of Australia but due to "administrative incompetence" he had failed to do so.

[3] By his own admission in 1998, the 1960s had brought Hope considerable professional success owing to his strategic decision to join the Liberal Party of Australia.

He became President of the NSW Council of Civil Liberties "but within weeks" he was then appointed Justice of the New South Wales Supreme Court.

He also acknowledged that on two occasions he had allowed himself to be pressured by President Athol Moffitt into reaching decisions "he would have otherwise not made".

[7][8] Hope was known as a "university senator and chancellor, a patron and promoter of the performing arts, (and) a civil libertarian".

In 2002, a park in the Northern Canberra suburb of Watson was named in his honour in recognition of his (unrealised) environmental work.

Its findings formed the backbone of the Whitlam government's heritage and environmental agenda although its landmark recommendations were never realised.

[13][8] In 1974, Prime Minister Gough Whitlam appointed Justice Hope to head the Royal Commission on Intelligence and Security (RCIS).

Later, in 1998, Hope revealed that he regretted a number of his core recommendations and that he found ASIO to be a highly partisan and incompetent organisation.

Hope designated ASIO as the agency responsible for producing national threat assessments in the field of terrorism and politically motivated violence and at the end of 1979, a new ASIO Act came into being which implemented many of Hope's recommendations from the RCIS and the PSR.

In 1983, the Hawke government requested that Hope once again become commissioner for the Royal Commission into Australia's Security and Intelligence Agencies.

Hope completed the Royal Commission into Australia's Security and Intelligence Agencies (RCASIA) in 1984 and made a range of logical and basic recommendations (in terms of the evolution of policies of the time) that again altered the parameters that Australia's intelligence agencies operated under and bought them into the political and cultural paradigms of the 1980s.

One of Justice Hope's RCASIA recommendations was that "the ASIO Act expressly provide that it is not the purpose of the Act that the right of lawful advocacy, protest or dissent should be affected or that exercising those rights should, by themselves, constitute activity prejudicial to security".

[16] This recommendation was important from a cultural aspect in the sense that it effectively removed security agencies from suppression of civil protest and dissent in Australia.

He also recommended the creation of the office of Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security to oversee and hold accountable the various agencies.