Who Will Judge The Judges?

Are we moving from a designedly liberal to an increasingly opinionated equation? This cynical question has come to increasingly haunt me as a lawyer. With over three decades at the Bar, there are times when I believe this is perhaps the best time with a whole set of young ‘willing to listen’ judges. At the same time my experience also seems to draw my attention to some discerning scribbles on the wall.
It was just the other day I stood up before the court to argue a matter. The judge hearing the matter would believe he had the answer to all the issues that my client required no mercy (read no hearing) and therefore the matter required a summary closure. This leads to the basic question on how the institution works or is designed to work. Does the judge really know so much that the lawyer does not? In the division of tasks between the Bar and the Bench is the submission of arguments an inferior task to the verdict rendering exercise? Is the judge with the aura of constitutional authority to encourage debate or stifle it in the context of time and docket management?
Arguably time is at a huge premium in an institution where dockets are bursting in the seams and the heavily weighed system is fighting for speed. To take a look at the issue from another stand point: are judges required to be system managers or arbiters of causes. Surely in a system so loaded in inequalities and inequities people are bound to believe they have a chance. Hope is their chance. Our democratic polity has developed many cracks and legal issues are intricately connected to social isms and philosophy. “Don’t lecture, this is a court hall” is an oft heard judicial command. I have never had the wisdom of delineating law from philosophy and have often erred in combining the two. The mother and the child have the need to travel along and this I have often seen the red signal that comes I thought under an automation rather than as a single requiring my special silence. Of course causes have counsels and counsels may not be specialists in time management. So are not judges. Do not lecture is a poor refrain and suggests a statement of power not really traceable to any known healthy source in the debating structure of law courts. Why sometimes even the expression ‘debate’ is frowned at!!
Just as the moot question who will police the police has found no answer, who will judge the judges may end in a poor echo. The Bar as a collective must the Learned Bench at all levels that to silence the Bar even in the name of docket burden is not a healthy sign and certainly not in tune with the physics of the present legal system. The vigour of the legal system in the country lies in its transparency which includes a detailed open hearing of all matters. Some judges are truly gifted. They are jurisprudential heirs of a Voltaire or a Subba Rao. Not all are. The system therefore requires them to hear before their pronounce. Neither of the tasks is a routine or a formality. Even a suggestive suspicion that it is being reduced to a formality would lead to cynicism and thereby loss of confidence.
It is not out of context to quote Alexander Solzhenitsyn who said: Justice is conscience not a personal conscience but the conscience of the whole of humanity. Our system frowns at despotism of any kind and law courts are not above the designer patter. Even in the hotly contested OJ Simpson case it is not out of context to state that Marge Simpson said You know, the courts may not be working any more, but as long as everyone is videotaping everyone else, justice will be done. In short, she was advocating visible debate. She was calling for a pattern that does not depend on a particular whim but an informed set of alternatives. There lies the fulcrum. That is crucial. The Lords are Lordships in grace and in task. If the twain were to part, than the definition may take a beating. The American novelist James Baldwin put it succinctly: If one really wishes to know how justice is administered in a country, one does not question the policemen, the lawyers, the judges, or the protected members of the middle class. One goes to the unprotected–those, precisely, who need the law’s protection most!–and listens to their testimony.
There lies the strength. Sometimes, strain not muscle is strength.