"Complicity or Complacency? Judging Judges in Authoritarian States"
Raymond Wacks
The Montréal Review
Published online: June 2024
Courts personify the law. In the more grandiloquent accounts of the legal system, judges are depicted as its custodians, guardians of its values, sentinels of justice and fair play. They embody fairness, evenhandedness, and impartiality. And an independent judiciary is among the hallmarks of the rule of law. The jurist Ronald Dworkin memorably observed that ‘courts are the capitals of law’s empire, and judges are its princes.’
Judges are not, however, always perceived in these lofty terms. In the words of a distinguished English judge:
[T]he public entertain a range of views, not all consistent (one minute they are senile and out of touch, the next the very people to conduct a detailed and searching inquiry; one minute port-gorged dinosaurs imposing savage sentences on hapless miscreants, the next wishy-washy liberals unwilling to punish anyone properly for anything), although often unfavourable.
Judges are, like all of us, tainted by personal predilections and political prejudices. Yet occasionally it is asserted that to acknowledge judicial frailty is, in some sense, subversive, ‘as if judges’, as the illustrious American judge Benjamin Cardozo put it, ‘must lose respect and confidence by the reminder that they are subject to human limitations.’ They are, nevertheless, the archetypical legal institution. Their independence epitomises the very apotheosis of justice, and the ostensible demarcation between legislation and adjudication is one of the most cherished elements of a free society.
Whatever their imperfections, independent judges perform another important role in a democratic society......(Please click here to view the full text of the article)
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