Sir Samuel Walker Griffith GCMG PC KC (21 June 1845 – 9 August 1920) was an Australian judge and politician who served as the inaugural Chief Justice of Australia, in office from 1903 to 1919.

He led the Australian delegation to the 1887 Colonial Conference and took a keen interest in external affairs, giving financial and administrative support to the newly annexed Territory of Papua and establishing the Queensland Maritime Defence Force.

Griffith was involved in the drafting of the federal Judiciary Act 1903, which established the High Court of Australia, and was subsequently nominated by Alfred Deakin to become the inaugural Chief Justice.

[3][4] He continued his studies at the University of Sydney, where he graduated Bachelor of Arts in 1863, with first-class honours in classics, mathematics and natural science.

Griffith's election as Premier was assisted by auditor-general William Leworthy Goode Drew's report on the colony's loans having reached over £13 million.

He passed an act for this purpose,[5] but it was found that the danger of the destruction of the sugar industry was so great that the measure was never made operative.

He introduced a bill to legalise trade unions, and declared that "the great problem of this age is not how to accumulate wealth but how to secure its more equitable distribution".

The following year his government took an active role in arresting and prosecuting leaders of the 1891 shearers' strike, with Griffith personally praising this decision.

[9] In consequence he could not be a delegate to the Federal Australasian Convention of 1897-8 which produced, in near final form, the Constitution of Australia, but he acted as a behind-the-scenes advisor to Sir Robert Garran, secretary of the Drafting Committee, which followed the structure he had laid out in 1891.

[1] In May 1900 he authored the very last amendment to the Constitution in the face of a standoff between the Colonial Secretary, Joseph Chamberlain and Edmund Barton over the right to appeal judgements of the High Court of Australia to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council.

Whereas Chamberlain wished the Constitution to give more space to such appeals, Barton, with Charles Kingston and Alfred Deakin, wanted them left restricted.

Griffith privately damned the behaviour of Barton and Kingston as "monstrous", and formulated the compromise wording which appears in Section 74, and which appeased the involved parties.

[12] When the federal parliament passed the Judiciary Act 1903, which created the High Court of Australia, Griffith was the natural choice as the first Chief Justice.

He was also one of five justices to have previously served on the Supreme Court of Queensland, along with William Webb, Harry Gibbs, Susan Kiefel and Patrick Keane.

[11] In January 1918, Griffith was appointed by Prime Minister Billy Hughes as head of a Royal Commission into the recruitment levels needed to maintain the Australian Imperial Force's fighting strength overseas.

Griffith was given such narrow terms of reference that his report took only a single week, and was effectively little more than a mathematical problem relating to the "existing size of the AIF, likely future losses of men, the numbers required to replace them, and so on".

It is the most recent occasion on which a sitting High Court judge has chaired a Royal Commission; Griffith had also authorised the first, which was conducted by George Rich in 1915 and also concerned military issues.

Cemetery records indicate that their plot adjoins that of Griffith's dear friend Charles Mein (1841–1890) (barrister, politician and judge), the pair having met during their undergraduate studies at the University of Sydney.