I revert to reconsideration of the unfortunate situation we are in, with widespread reports of two new appointments of judges to the Supreme Court having been decided on, but not officially announced. The Law Lords used to sit in the House, but now they are called Justices of the Supreme Court and have their own building on Parliament Square.
To be a member of the Supreme Court is simply the highest legal honour and responsibility that can be conferred by English law, and for that matter is also so regarded by the common law countries and others. It is a position that demands the highest integrity, intellect, commitment to the rule of law, empathy and respect. We have a splendid record of such judges, albeit a sad lack of women in that position, save only for Baroness Hale. I’ll return to that issue in another blog.
What concerns me now is that there are stories in the press that a barrister, who has never been a high court judge, is one of the selections, and that he wants to postpone taking up the position in order to undertake a case for which he has been retained and which will earn him millions of pounds in fees. Surely this cannot be true? Any appointment to the Supreme Court ought be a person who has proved himself or herself as a judge in our highest courts, although no doubt giving judgment in the Supreme Court is a different technique. One cannot take a risk on someone who has not been through that testing process. Moreover, leapfrogging the lower courts would send a message to other potential judges that they should not give up their well paid practices as barristers to accept appointment as a high court judge with lower earnings, but carry on and wait for a call straight to the Supreme Court. This is more damaging to judicial recruitment than the cut in pensions mooted for judges and which has already been the subject of complaint in this respect. And if it were true that a barrister can delay taking up his position on the Supreme Court in order to earn a large sum in a case, this undermines the respect in which judges are held. Moreover, how can such a case be heard without any appearance of conflict, if the judge hearing it knows that the barrister presenting arguments to him is soon to be in the Supreme Court, hearing appeals against those lower court hearings? No, the story about this appointment cannot be true.
In December 2010, Frances Gibb reported in the Times that Mr Sumption had again applied for the Supreme Court. Since then there has been no news. Yesterday, Joshua Rozenberg reported his “understanding” that
“the five candidates were interviewed for the two vacancies in the UK Supreme Court. They are (in alphabetical order): Sir Maurice Kay, Sir John Laws, Sir Timothy Lloyd, Jonathan Sumption OBE QC, Sir Nicholas Wilson“
http://ukscblog.com/supreme-court-appointments-part-2-of-the-sumption-saga
Despite that, it is believed that Sumption was selected for one of the two vacant posts at the court. I say ‘it is believed’ because there had been no confirmation from Downing Street by the beginning of this week – although I reported three weeks ago that Sumption and Lord Justice Wilson had been told they would get the two jobs on offer.
This time, brainpower has trumped common sense: Sumption’s supporters – personified by Phillips, as president of the Supreme Court – seem to have defeated his opponents – personified by Lord Judge, lord chief justice of England and Wales
http://www.lawgazette.co.uk/opinion/joshua-rozenberg/likely-appointment-jonathan-sumption-supreme-court-controversial
Yes, it is quite wrong to have any level of worker empowered to do self-ambitious ‘leap-frogging’, up’ by similarly-corrupted other sinecurists;
and it is wrong to allow any workplace to judge misdemeanors and malfeasances perpetrated by its own members;
but it is also very seriously and insidiously undermining of truth, justice, democratic human development, and sustainworthy-civilisation to be conflating “earning” with “being-given” and “squeezing out”, from the Common Purse.
Drawing many times more than one’s necessary and sufficient one human living, namely £200 per week that every person but especially leaders should be able to live-well off i.e. to make and maintain themselves healthy, citizenlike, and environmentally-supportive*, is ‘omnicidal’.
* Draw twice that sufficient human-living from the Common Purse and you are not only being only 50% personally efficient, you are destroying Humankind’s and All Other Creatures’ lifesupports twice as heavily as is the 100% personally efficient Earth-citizen namely the person capable of living healthily, citizenlike and environmenntally-supportive off £200 per week.
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Sitting Peers, as well as The Monarchy, the House of Commons, the Civil Service, the Health and Illnesses Curing Services, the Police and Armed Forces, The Private Sector and the Community-Sector are supposed to be not just All-Peoples’ last defenders, against life-threatening invasions, attacks and wars: they have to be supporting and ever striving to improve People’s many and various sustain-worthinesses, needs and affordable-hows thereto, against constitutions, laws, and practices that have fallen into wastefulness of both Life and Resources, into neglect of both Individual and Collective Human Development, and into hedonistic-fantasy and phantasmagoria instead of into historical-factuality and sustainworthy-futurity.
Sub-summary:
There is no way one human-being can draw or be given from the Common Purse lifesupports & life-destructive-weaponry in excess of one-human-living and claim to have “earned” it.
None can be excluded from this fact-of-Earthlife’s Carrying Capacity, none amongst The JOTSC, The Parliaments, the People’s Leaders, The Professions, The Communities, and The Monarchy –
in which latter we could relevantly and critically note Prince Charles’s words, addressing the European Parliament currently in the Matter of Our Human Survival and Thrival within this Earth’s Natural Systems and Resources.
One telling if somewhat dangly question, that he was courageous or perhaps foolish enough to voice being
“We have to see that there is a direct relationship between the Resilience of the Earth’s Ecosystems and our National Economies … and I know there is a great deal of ‘Debate’ about the meaning of ‘Resilience’ but… If the fabric of the Earth’s Lifesupport System fragments, as it appears it may be starting to do,
If those systems become weak or collapse –
Essentially, if Nature’s Capital loses its innate resilience –
Then
How long does it take for our economic capital and economic systems to lose their resilience too ?”
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Yet, despite such fine speeches from such ‘leaders’ as Prince Charles, David Attenborough, E.O. Wilson, The United Nations, The European Parliament, such Bodies as the one producing The Strategic Energy Technology Plan, and many long-forgotten and buried sources such as Professors Charles Sherrington and his ‘Living-Earth’ successor James Lovelock, David Smith, David Bellamy, and David Attenborough;
these ‘leaders’ are each luxuriously careering-on drawing obscene numbers of human-livings from the Common Purse –
with due respect for what each is good at, none of them are leaderful in this essential sense of transparently living as an example to one and all.
The JOTSC need to face and internalise the same scrutiny, both as individual persons and in their duties as Judges of the Supreme Court.
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0603Th210411.JSDM.
On the basis of this, I suggest you wouldn’t make a very good Supreme Court Justice!
What a dastardly cowardly-personal-attack, and truth-and-reality-avoidant ploy, trying to pose as an expert’s reply, Murphy !
The three Principles of good communication and honest-argumentation are
1. Be clear – state your case unequivocally straight and succinct;
2. Be Charitable – clearly acknowledge whatever good-intention and reasoning every other participant puts forward;
3. Be Self-Correcting – wherever your factuality, intention, or conduct is shown to be wrong, retract and openly commit yourself to doing right in future.
The main Need and Affordable-How put forward is to:
Urgently establish Sustainworthiness, both of individualised and collectivised People and of our English-speaking Civilisation,
and to at least begin this within what Prince Charles called “both the Earth’s Resilient natural Systems and our Nation-State Economies (once the latter have been made resilient)”;
and to require all existing Leaders and Highly-paid workers, private companies, families and Individuals in present-particular including Judges, Parliamentarians, The Monarchy, The Establishment, and all subsidiary Social-Bodies and community neighbourhood committees leaders
to visibly and accountably make themselves both personally-efficient in the Lifeplace and job-efficient in the Workplace*.
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To tackle the question baroness Murphy unintentionally raises, namely the worthiness of any individual at any level to “make a very good Justice of the Supreme Court”:
I claim that I have already long been a judge, and a very good judge too, not only of the Supreme Court
but of parliaments, of princes and princesses; and of ‘paupers’, as well as of Peoples and ‘Publics’.
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* see Lord Haskel’s “Fair Internet Use” 180411 4th comment.
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Correction to my above, please:
For “Murphy” read “Deech”;
for “baroness Murphy” read “baroness Deech”.
In a spirit towards cooperative-improvement of two-way communications, facts & factors-sharing, and honest-argumentation.
1755GF220411.JSDM.
People may want to understand why the British need to adopt a justice system enacted throughout the USA? What is it that the Supreme Court there has that we didn’t have here? Does it make that country more lawful? Does it create a more equal society or spread the word on Human Rights more evenly for those who suffer the death penalty of that splendid followable society?
The British were the founders of regulated Law and Justice throughout the planet, to take on the system of an inferior society is not only short sighted it borders on the insane.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_law
And do ‘Supreme Court’s’ do anything for the rights of innocent individuals not to die or be tortured within their jurisdiction. Not according tho this they don’t.
http://articles.cnn.com/2002-02-11/justice/death.penalty.report_1_james-liebman-death-penalty-capital-punishment?_s=PM:LAW
Bringing a Supreme Court to Britain was another of T. Blair’s sucking up to Uncle Sam. Handing the UK over as another Hawaii. It is a waste of money, effort and sense. What we had was the best. What we will get is a politically correct fudge. A spin and an expensive one.
What the British people need is a court of protest against government policies, now that would be money well spent.
Maude – our Supreme Court shares the same name as the top US court, but it is not meant to be like it at all. It has the same powers and functions as did the Law Lords when they were in the House of Lords. And it certainly does challenge government policies, especially on terrorism and other human rights issues, where the government frequently loses cases before the Supreme Court.
@Baroness Deech:
Now that is not strictly honest is it? Because government or Parliament selects the judges and they will not choose those who are not of the same mind on issues. And, government can change the law at any time to negate decisions made by any court, including the Supreme Court.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_United_Kingdom
Not to mention judges can be and often are fired when they fall from grace.
We none of us need a “more equal” society if that is going to go on resulting in such hugely un-sustain-worthy civilisations as today still dominate this Earth,
and that have already long been tearing the heart out of Half of a Second Planet Earth as well
(see “How Many People Can Live on Planet Earth” David Attenborough et al, Eden HD 1900-2000Th070411).
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Consider also, please, that at Root one pro-tests In-Favour –
of something-better than what is now, or is future-planned to be, destructively-dominating us;
if the move is “against” then it is “rebellion” not “protest”.
Instantiating that: I am herein pro-testing in favour of Protest
(which I also see as being a major-component and definiens of any Peaceful-Revolution);
I am not pro-testing in favour of rebellion, namely herein against “government policies”
(even ‘though I would be peacefully-supportive even of a
“bloody-revolution” against some bad “government policies” and other “malfeasances or mass-crimes” that prevail across the world and to a micro-extent across the united kingdom too).
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That “out of the way” Maude, I agree that a Peoples Court of Protest is both a Need and an Affordable-How.
But as John Donne shows in his letter to God, there is more – and much more:
firstly I think must be that The People are long overdue for cooperatively making Themselves sustain-worthy; and
secondly that the fact
(that our Ruling Monarchs, Establishments, Governments, Private-Capitalists, Educational, Religious, ‘Health’, Leaders and Organisations, all having been and still being corrupted well past the point of being sustain-worthy)
should not be deterring us People from laterally-cooperatively making ourselves sustain-worthy;
and after all we democratic People are by some very real definition the Primary Sovereign Power;
(in which I would now protest in favour of “equality”)
and just to round that off a bit, at the “bottom” end of the Population that is being topped by Supreme-Courts-Et-Al,
I would be most strongly against the “Kangaroo-Court”;
but would be very-strongly supportive of dispassionate, and holisticly-balanced & balancing, “Peoples’ Real- Needs and Affordable-Hows Networks and Courts”.
1401GF220411.JSDM.
Baroness Deech, I think your point about the issue of delay is very strong but how do you rebut the counter-argument to your assertion that ‘one cannot take a risk on someone who has not been through that testing process’ and the other problems of leap-frogging as personified by Lord Reid and Lord Radcliffe (among others)?
Also, although possibly something for your future blog post, what value do you place on the argument that if Mr Sumption is appointed that could speed up the appointment of more women who could come straight from the bar?
Good first point, JH, but the appointments you refer to were well over 60 years ago, in a different climate. And the CVs of Radcliffe and Reid contain weighty political and administrative experience. Now we have a Judicial Appointments Commission!
Women would just like to get on to the High Court bench, I venture to suggest, not straight to the Supreme Court. Baroness Hale spent much of her career as a legal academic, but she served in the High Court and Court of Appeal with distinction before the final promotion.
The British were the founders of regulated Law and Justice throughout the planet
But not Spain or anywhere in South America.
One of the criticisms levelled at the ECtHR is that some of the judges have not had prior judicial experience.
If Jonathan Sumption OBE QC, has been appointed to the UKSC then it destroys that argument doesn’t it?
CarlH above refers to Laws LJ, however, if he is appointed did the appointees read his judgment in Chester CofA where he admitted that he could not understand Hirst v UK (No2) and Frodl v Austria? Worse still, Lord Neuberger MR, and Carnwath LJ, also admitted beng in ignorance of the law!
When a friend who is a judge tells me “Don’t put your faith in judges, they cannot be trusted” alarm bells ring in my mind!
Similarly –
if you are being, or have been, done wrong, by a Government/Civil-Service Department, you can only complain,
and that complaint for instance against the Police you have to submit to the Police themselves.
((The so called IPCC (Independent Police Complaints Commission)simply sends any such complaint straight to the offending Constabulary to be judged and dealt with) !
Guess the result ?
Instance: I have been an actively loyal British citizen, from actively loyal pure English parentage and association, for 83 years beginning at the local Infants School, then the Boys Elementary School, then the County Secondary, then Plymouth College, then Plymouth Technical College, then the Regular Army’s 10th Leader Training Battalion, then January 1947 the (new) Royal Military Academy Sandhurst … and had been a Church of England choirboy, a Baden-Powell Boy Scout, an ARP/Civil Defence Messenger, a JTC Cadet, a certificate-A level instructor in the Army Cadet Force, and in my spare-time a piano-entertainer for the Troops and my local-community…and later under permanent-residence status for 29 years in Australia I ‘uniquely’ took part in their Governmental Public Consultations, Hearings, and Reviews,
making something like twenty written or formal-recorded submissions; and with the now Ms Adela Miles was the only elderly supporter and registered residently active British-Australian member of the first government-supported Self-Sufficiency Commune outside of Israel namely ‘Pondalonga’ near Nimbin NSW (which was in short order closed-down by a combination of local neighbouring cattle (and cattle-tic) farmers, the Catholic church, the NSW Conservative government and its puppeted-leadership in the community itself, and lack of both other external support and of internal frailties and inabilities and unwillingnesses to conduct Friendly Method III Needs & Affordable-Hows win-win-win Cooperative Problem Solving…
so I repatriated myself in 2001 to Plymouth UK, where I was quickly especially invited to sit on the Plymouth MIND Management Committee;
but in 2004 I was very upsettingly harassed first by a gang of four youths and then by the Police (whom I had called but who turned out to already know the four-youths and to already be believing their quickly concocted pack-of-lies against me) who wouldn’t allow me to give my full account of the incident but instead by a sort of ‘kangaroo-court-of-two-policement’ read out to me the following imjunction:
“This is a recorded incident and can be brought out and used against you at any time in the future”…
which caused me to go straight to my GP and ask for regular support for my Health, because I was isolated, and no longer trusted the Police nor the Community, and was afraid of my mind and spirit becoming imbalanced as an iatrogenic result;
so the GP referred me as a volunteer for ‘psychological-monitoring and support’ to the NHS’s then new Mental Health Support for Older People (MHSOP)
which put a Psychologist in charge (NB specificly not a psychiatrist) who offered to look me over once a month for an hour in her office, and agreed my case would be kept non-psychiatric and non-pharmacological; just a monitoring and possibly verbal advice service;
but although non-threatening for seven years, never has that NHS GP and MHSOP service helped me to progress through the most modern-advances published, to become more resilient, to further positivise my personal, social and citizenship days, and to reverse the several iatrogenic-impairments that had by now accumulated; and they reject every modern-advance and publication that I ask for help and participatory-support to work through;
and they still refuse to offer even one ‘Self-Help’ or ‘with the NHS’s help’ practical resource book, either.
As well as the NHS MHSOP rejecting and suppressing the modern-health and individual-human-development advances well-published and many of which I have been putting forward,
GPs, Local governance, Adult-education, Housing Association Landlords and Tenants Associations, AgeUK, AgeConcern, Mind, U3A, Religions, even the whole range of authorised Complementary therapists, all behave un-supportively, many hostilely, thereto.
Last week a big, burly, cigarette-smoking and be-spectacled “NHS MHSOP Health Worker” turned up at my single bedsit-flat and told me, in one-way-directive-communication short order, that he is a Psychiatric Nurse with high psychiatric-therapist qualifications and experience especially in ‘psychiatric-existentialism’, and that I have always been a psychiatric-case, and must remain so or all NHS help would be removed from me.
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Check through all my previous submissions to http://lordsoftheblog.net
and visit the voluntary non-profit citizen’s websites I try to maintain
http://www.lifefresh.co.uk ; http://www.75l25w.com ;
and you will see how I am still trying to “fight the good fight”
but against impossibly negativising and corrupt governance and individual-human-development establishments.
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I do apologise, even abjectly, for the length of this submission;
but the truth is that the Lords of the Blog is the only safe-place I know of in the UK and indeed in the whole world where impartial-publication is given, and a reasonable reply be also given, by ‘any-one’ sufficiently disinterested and democratic.
0301ESn240411.JSDM. 812 words.
One of the criticisms levelled at the ECtHR is that some of the judges have not had prior judicial experience.
If Jonathan Sumption OBE QC, has been appointed to the UKSC then it destroys that argument doesn’t it?
Jailhouse lawyer speaks the truth. Are the European court Judges not of a higher calibre still?!
A bigger and more insidiously negativising factor, than “lack of prior professional experience”, is
“progressive erosion of personal-life-efficiency” i.e. of individual ability to make-ends-meet, meaning to make and maintain one-self healthy, citizenlike, and environmentally-supportive, outside of the workplace, on the legislated one-sufficient-living of £200 per week;
because
Every human living given or drawn from the Common Purse extra to the one £200 each human-being (in Britain at least) needs and has-a-right-to, not only inefficiently, anti-socially, and greedily depletes the Common Purse
it also causes Destructivity of our Common Earth Lifesupports and Non-Renewable Resources.
“The quality of Mercy is twice blessed ..”
“The quality of Greed is twice accursed ..”
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A necessary and succinctly articulated blog post. The Supreme Court, as did the House of Lords before it, contains the very best legal minds in this country and is held in very high regard here and abroad. And rightly so.
The requirements of judicial office are quite different from those of a practising barrister, solicitor or academic, and it is vital that those who take up the post of a Justice of the Supreme Court have experience in the High Court and Court of Appeal prior to their appointment. There has been some criticism of some of the judges of the European Court of Human Rights – some valid, some not – and one recurring theme is the lack of judicial experience of some of the judges there. We must not let that be the case here.
More worrying than that, however, is the idea that a judge could preside over a trial in circumstances where he or she knows that one of the counsel before him or her is soon to be a Justice of the Supreme Court. A tribunal must be independent and impartial and the risk of an Article 6 (fair trial) challenge to the outcome of any such case is all too possible. Judges should not be put in such circumstances and if this were to mean the particular barrister having to choose between taking on the case and taking up his appointment to the Supreme Court then so be it. Fairness and justice demands that he not be allowed to choose both.
Along with Baroness Deech, I hope that the rumours are not true. If they are, then it is a great shame indeed.
With the greatest of respect, this story very probably is true. It seemed to be raised first of all by Joshua Rozenberg writing in The Guardian in late March. I did a post on this topic on my “Law and Lawyers” blog:
http://obiterj.blogspot.com/2011/03/selecting-justices-of-supreme-court-new.html
In my post I did not mention any of the names since I regarded much of Mr Rozenberg’s article as legal tittle-tattle though, to be fair, it is probably well informed. Instead, I looked at the process for making these appointments.
I think that there is a need for the Constitutional Reform Act 2005 to be amended so that Supreme Court Justices are appointed only from those who have held office as High Court Judge for at least 5 years.
Furthermore, there seems to be a need to re-examine the role of the Secretary of State for Justice / Lord Chancellor in this process. Yet another point is that certain serving senior judges seem to be “consulted” about this matter and there was an unseemly situation in relation to the appointment of Sir John Dyson. That leads to yet another point which is that appointees really ought to receive life peerages. The courtesy title of “Lord” is unsatisfactory.
I agree with you when you say: “To be a member of the Supreme Court is simply the highest legal honour and responsibility that can be conferred by [the] law, and for that matter is also so regarded by the common law countries and others.”
All candidates should be expected to take up appointment on the date offered. If that means they have to drop a lucrative brief then so be it. The advertisement for new justices made it reasonably as yo when the vacancies were to arise.
“Diversity” is another significant issue. The first problem is that it is not merely appointing more women. The court has to reflect the various jurisdictions from which appeals come: England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Then there is the importance of trying to achieve, among the 12 Justices, a balance of legal experience. I submit that those should be the primary factors to consider before one gets to gender, ethnicity or whatever. The personal likes and dislikes of the President of the Court ought not to come into it. [Does he need to be on the selection panel?]
It perhaps also needs to be borne in mind that the Justices of the Supreme Court also often form the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. Personally, I would like to see more Commonwealth judges being invited to sit on appeals even if the judge is not from a country which has retained such appeals.
Just some thoughts – hope they assist.
The die is cast:
http://www.supremecourt.gov.uk/docs/pr_1105.pdf
“Any appointment to the Supreme Court ought be a person who has proved himself or herself as a judge in our highest courts”
Perhaps Baroness Deech should familiarise herself with s.25 of the Constitional Reform Act 2005, which provides that:
“A person is not qualified to be appointed a judge of the Supreme Court unless he has (at any time)…been a qualifying practitioner for a period of at least 15 years.”
Thus a person who has been a qualifying practioner for 15 years is eligible for appointment. No additional requirement of judicial service is specified by the Act.
One can only assume that the chairman of the BSB is not advocating that the Judicial Appointments Commission unlawfully fetter its discretion by refusing to consider an applicant who has met the qualifying criteria, on the grounds that they have not additionally served as a High Court Judge?
I suspect you would not need to be Jonathan Sumption to win that case…