This blog has previously referred to the wearing of wigs by barristers. Until fairly recently the wearing of a wig by a barrister was compulsory under the Rules of the Superior Courts. (The Rules are law [well, a kind of law] and are made by the Rules Committee. Its membership is chosen, it would appear, to be representative of some of the various “interests” in the legal system).

Currently, it is obligatory on judges of the superior courts to likewise wear wigs.

As an issue this is simply not open to debate. The wearing of wigs is required because that’s the way it is.

Situations like this can be explained, but not by seeking opinions to explain the reasons for the situation. Instead we have to look to psychology.

The real purpose is to assert wordlessly, the finality of rational adjudication from the judge. That is, it is intended to define rationality by reference to the wig; rationality emanates from the wig. Without it, there is doubt and possibly confusion.

In 1973 David Rosenhan and some colleagues demonstrated that “sane” and “insane” were social constructs.

Likewise, in the field of law, the “plaintiff”, the “defendant” and the “judge” are social constructs.

This very dangerous [from one point of view] for the judge.

Leo Tolstoy has remarked:

The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him.”

There must, in short, be mechanisms to cut short the revelation of alternative, including superior, expositions of reality.

The judicial wig is one of those mechanisms.

We surely want to know the outcome of the case referred to HERE.

However, we’re very busy attending CPD courses and the like and we can easily miss the delivery of judgment. In any event, there is a tendency for judges to notify the members of the bar of impending judgment and to ignore the solicitors (and of course, the litigants).

The answer is Twitter.

See HERE for the uses of Twitter. Every judge can now have his/her “followers” and indeed, may use Twitter to sample opinion with a view to staying onside any any particularly thorny legal question.

Think how handy it would be to know that the legal profession are sanguine with the proposal to remove the reference to God from the Constitution!

The uses are endless.

“I was there!”

Sometimes, hopefully not. Avoid the car crashes of life, if you can; car crashes as described HERE
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The “car crashes” arose because of the poor quality of judgments in three cases, English, Withers and Verrechia.

In English, the court of appeal remarked:

The Judge could have explained the issue and his reasoning process in comparatively few words. It is regrettable that he did not do so and that it has taken the appellate process and the assistance of counsel who appeared at the trial to enable us to follow the Judge’s reasoning. Having done so we conclude that this appeal must be dismissed.”

In Withers the court remarked:

We turn to the section of the judgment dealing with causation. We have not found this easy to analyse. We have been able to identify a number of different reasons for the Judge’s conclusions, but these are not set out in logical order; they are intertwined. So far as the expert evidence is concerned, the Judge has attempted to summarise the technical issues, but on occasion fallen between two stools, so that the relevance of the facts set out in the judgment to the particular issue is incomprehensible.”

In Verrechia the court, although finding, substantially in favour of the Plaintiff did not award him his costs. It gave no reasons for this course.

Matters were in each case made more difficult by the decision of the court of appeal in concluding that, while the judgments were deficient, it was possible to discover what the reasons for the judgment were in each case. Consequently, the appellants although aggrieved at the absence of reasons in the original judgments did not win on appeal and lost more money on legal costs.

It may seem perverse to say it currently, but the world is improving. The world financial system is teetering; the people of Iceland must pay in cash for their needs and we in Ireland must endure cynical lies from people who personally failed in their jobs and wish the consequences to fall elsewhere on victims without power.

Nevertheless, it is true.

We see it in the abolition of an outrageous assumption; that people of power may beat up other people.

Section 24 of the Non-Fatal Offences Against the Person Act 1997 provides;

24.—The rule of law under which teachers are immune from criminal liability in respect of physical chastisement of pupils is hereby abolished.”

My goodness, is it possible we may yet see a disciplinary code and complaints and regulation system for judges?

It is, fortunately, no longer general to find the idea of progress to be a given. Undoubtedly some do believe in progress, but they do not imply it is the general context in which to understand or view events.

An equivalent idea is the idea that everything comes, or will come, out finally. An idea like this is a faith, or part of a faith. It, or the idea of progress, like all faiths, is very powerful.

It does not bear examination, although it is difficult to refute.

It is useless, for example, to uncover cases of previously unknown “things�?. All such revelations prove the very proposition they are intended to deny.

The reason it does not stand up to scrutiny is that it assumes the regular dichotomy is between the known and the unknown, whereas it is actually between the perceived and the “not perceived�? and perception is hugely socially conditioned.

We colloquially refer to this fact by asking why nobody is acknowledging “the elephant in the room�?. We often, in fact, conspire to ignore some things.

People of a conventional cast of mind are, by definition, most at home in such circumstances. Consequently, we favour those people when we seek to have “truths�? suppressed or ignored. They are the ideal candidates for appointment to be judges, for instance.