The Australian legal system appears to be under stress. More is asked of it, and it is cut less slack. The family courts are crowded as cases are often bitterly fought and protracted as clients and lawyers resist negotiation. Magistrates complain of heavy workloads that leave no space for reflection.
At the same time judicial discretion is increasingly restricted by mandatory sentencing and limitations in access to bail and remand. Politicians, including attorneys general, are quick to criticise judicial decisions with which they disagree. Social media has increasingly assumed a judicial function of naming and punishing offenders, and victims of crime demand a more central say in sentencing.
Debate about the independence and the dignity of the law has always been present. Nevertheless most societies take pains to reinforce trust in those who administer justice. Some elements in our culture, however, put that trust at risk. They deserve reflection.
It is customary for rulers to exalt the law and its processes and for those caught up in its practice criticise it. Many historians have seen the law as the great achievement of the Roman Empire, and have credited the British with bestowing on its colonies a great gift in the English legal system. The dignity of the Law is symbolised in solemn court rituals and dress, in the state honours that judges have routinely received, and in the practice of conferring on retired judges the responsibility for Government enquiries.
Critics, however, have always scratched away at the mystique of the law by exposing the venality, pretensions and incompetence of its administration. Colonial research, court dramas, novels and levelling movements in society have all set out to expose the clay feet on which the statues of lawgivers rested.
St Augustine was one of the most incisive social critics in the ancient world. He contrasted the glorious public image of Roman institutions and their representatives with their messy human reality. In his time judges could order complainants, defendants and witnesses to be tortured in civil cases when necessary to establish the truth of their evidence. He argued that the harm done to the victims of torture by the judge’s decision to impose it was certain, but that both the confessions gained through it, and the protestations of innocence maintained despite it, were uncertain testimonies of truth. And yet, although judges remained in their ignorance after resorting to torture, they continued routinely to rely on it. Augustine remarks:
‘The wise judge does not act in this way through a will to do harm, but because ignorance is unavoidable — and yet the exigences of human society make judgment also unavoidable. Here we have the wretchedness of the human situation, even if it is not to be called the wickedness of the wise man in his judicial capacity.’
He concludes that judges should be pitied, not admired, for the necessary service they undertook for the good of their society. They are trapped in their necessities. But it was precisely the exigences of society that led people to shrink from Augustine’s cold focus on the wretchedness of the human situation. It made them exalt judges and their capabilities. They found that trust in the ability of judges to discover the truth, accompanied by increasingly elaborate systems of review, was needed in an ordered society.
"In a culture that craves certainty, whatever goes wrong is always someone’s fault. Litigation flourishes. Litigants, secure in their own certainties, do not negotiate but demand that the judge condemns and punishes the guilty parties whom they have already identified."
Trust in judges’ capacity to discover the truth can coexist with the recognition that they will sometimes make mistakes. But it will not long coexist with the expectation that they infallibly discover the truth. In a culture in which there is a demand for certainty, as is arguably our own culture, fallible judgments and judges are not acceptable. The quest for certainty engenders a demand for mechanical solutions driven by quantifiable data. Punishment must exactly match the crime, without allowing for such immeasurable matters as motivation, possibility of reform and circumstance.
The search for certainty also leads us to define by their crimes the persons who offend, and to assume that they will always be so defined. A person who robs a bank will be a bank robber for the rest of their life and so a risk to the community. If this is so, it becomes foolish to remand them before trial or to give them bail. We can never be certain that they will not reoffend.
In a culture that craves certainty, whatever goes wrong is always someone’s fault. Litigation flourishes. Litigants, secure in their own certainties, do not negotiate but demand that the judge condemns and punishes the guilty parties whom they have already identified. If the judicial system fails them they will seek judgment through social media.
Although our own society is certainly not a dystopia where everyone shares these attitudes, the demand for certainty in judgment does put at risk trust in the law. Law presupposes a community of fallible human beings capable of acting wrongly, capable of change, uncertain in judgment and prey to circumstance. Justice is ideally blind in the sense that it is unbiased. It is also necessarily blind also in the sense that both those making decisions and those for whom they make them work with darkened understanding. Trust is built finally on mutual love and not on certainty.
Andrew Hamilton is consulting editor of Eureka Street.
Main image: Statue of blindfolded Lady Justice holding scales and a sword (William Cho/Pixabay)