The court confirmed Thursday that Justice Paul Anastassiou, who left the bar for the Victorian registry of the court in February 2019; and Justice Jennifer Davies, previously a judge of the Supreme Court of Victoria, will retire in the next few months.

In stepping down from the bench they join Justice John Griffiths, who reaches the compulsory retirement age of 70 this year after a decade at the court in Sydney.

The longest serving current Federal Court judge is Justice Susan Kenny. She was appointed in October 1998.

With the pending vacancies comes the chance for the federal government to appoint more women to the bench. The departure of Justice Davies six years shy of the compulsory retirement age leaves 15 women sitting on the bench. They will be outnumbered more than two to one by their male cohorts.

Whether Attorney-General Michaelia Cash will fill the spots before the election, expected in May, is not yet known.

The daughter of former Federal Court judge Daryl Davies, Justice Davies has served on the court since July 2013. She has been a senior fellow at the University of Melbourne, lecturing in taxation law, since 2009.

At the Supreme Court of Victoria, Justice Davies was in charge of the Victorian Taxation Appeals. Prior to her judicial appointments, she was a senior counsel in Victoria, specialising in corporations, revenue, commercial and administrative law. She was a founding member of the Women Barristers Association in 1993.

Justice Davies was part of a Full Federal Court panel that found the federal government’s so-called backpacker tax did not discriminate between taxpayers on the basis of nationality. The High Court overturned the ruling in November.

In 2019, Justice Davies sided with Glencore in a significant tax judgment, setting aside the ATO’s $92 million tax assessment against the mining giant.

Justice Anastassiou, who was appointed by former Attorney-General Christian Porter, was previously senior counsel at the Victorian Bar.

In his 30-year career as a barrister, Justice Anastassiou had a broad commercial practice, with a focus on insolvency, banking, corporations matters, professional negligence and class actions, including acting for respondents in the Black Saturday class actions.

In August last year, Justice Anastassiou handed television network Seven a victory in its high profile bid for preliminary discovery against Cricket Australia in a spat over the 2020-2021 summer cricket season.

Justice Griffiths became a silk after just six years at the NSW bar. He practised as a senior counsel for 11 years before his elevation to the Federal Court in April 2013.

In 2018, Justice Griffiths ruled that a Victorian IVF law breached federal discrimination law by requiring a woman to seek the consent of her estranged husband before undergoing fertility treatment.

The same year he was part of a Full Court panel that shot down an employer group’s challenge to the merger of the CFMEU with two other unions.

In 2020, he was part of the majority on the appeals court that set aside a ruling for climate change skeptic Peter Ridd in his unfair dismissal case against James Cook University.

More recently, Justice Griffiths ruled that a contract between the Morrison government and a subsidiary for Empire Energy for gas exploration in the Beetaloo Basin was void for the federal government’s “capricious” conduct.

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