He received the George Knowles Memorial Prize at the Australian National University in 1962 and qualified with honours on his law degree.
On completion of his articles, he was admitted as a barrister and solicitor of the Supreme Court of the Australian Capital Territory in 1967.
[3] Higgins was appointed as a resident judge of the Supreme Court of the Australian Capital Territory in 1990, replacing Justice John Anthony Kelly QC.
[6] Higgins has delivered speeches at the National Press Club, the International Criminal Law Congress, the Australian Judicial Conference and given the Sir Richard Blackburn Lecture in 2006.
[7] One case which attracted media attention was Costello v Random House Australia Pty Ltd and Abbott v Random House Australia Pty Ltd.[8] In that case, the defendant published a book titled Goodbye Jerusalem: Night Thoughts of a Labour Outsider, a book written by Bob Ellis.
Ellis recounted an alleged conversation with Rodney Cavalier in which Cavalier was alleged to have stated that Abbott and Costello had been members of the right wing of the Australian Labor Party, and that both had changed political allegiances to the Liberal Party for sexual favours.
In his judgement delivered on 18 December 2002, Higgins found that the defendant’s publication conveyed the imputations of “plagiarism” and “lazy journalism”.
However, Carleton’s claim was dismissed as the imputations were found to be fair comment, notwithstanding that they weren’t true.
In dismissing the claim, Higgins said: “I am obliged to deny them damages, rightly so, as the defendants' freedom of speech, protected by fair comment, allows them to have published their opinions, however wrongheaded and prejudiced, without legal penalty.
This is not a just result but it is the only conclusion to which I can come.”[13]On 26 April 2016 Higgins was among the five Justices of the Supreme Court of Papua New Guinea who unanimously ruled that the Manus Regional Processing Centre breached the PNG constitution's right to personal liberty, and was thus illegal.