Pierre Slicer

Slicer joined the Australian Labor Party (ALP) as a young man, but resigned his membership in 1969 and instead joined the Communist Party of Australia (CPA).^[4] In 1974 he was elected state secretary of the Communist Party in place of Max Bound.^[5] He also served on the party's national committee and in 1976 toured Italy, Romania and Yugoslavia with a CPA delegation.^[6] He resigned as state secretary in 1979, attributed to health reasons,^[7] and later left the party after losing his enthusiasm for the movement.^[8]

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, Slicer was a leader of the Vietnam Moratorium movement in Devonport.^[9] He was a founding member and legal adviser to the Tasmanian Aboriginal Legal Service, also serving as counsel to the Tasmanian Wilderness Society and the Salamanca Campaign for gay rights.^[2] During the Franklin Dam controversy he was jailed for three weeks for his involvement in anti-dam protests.^[10]

Slicer was admitted to practise law in Tasmania in 1966.^[11] He was a member of the Tasmanian Law Reform Commission from 1974 to 1977.^[2] As one of the few criminal barristers in north-west Tasmania he was involved in a diverse range of cases and appeared in his first murder trial in his late twenties.^[8] He notably represented CSIRO scientist Rory Jack Thompson in the trial for the murder and dismemberment of his wife in 1984.^[12]

In 1991, Slicer was appointed as a justice of the Supreme Court of Tasmania. He retired in 2009 as the senior puisne judge of the court, but in 2017 was reappointed as an acting judge to help clear a backlog of cases.^[13]

Slicer spent three weeks in Samoa in 2006, as an independent judge on cases relating to the 2006 Samoan general election.^[14] After retiring from the Supreme Court of Tasmania, he served on the Supreme Court of Samoa from 2010 to 2014, including as a judge of the Court of Appeal. He was given the honorary chiefly rank of matai and adopted the Samoan-language name of Lautalatoa.^[2]