date

1823 Feb. 28 Greece. J.B's Observations
1823 Feb. 28

Greece. J.B's Observations etc.

Judiciary resumed

As the only effectual preventive of delay, power to every Judge to appoint Deputies in any number, to sit at the same time with himself for the dispatch of business in different causes, but let no emolument be receivable by any such Deputy at the expence either of the public or of individuals. No doubt can be entertained of willingness on the part of a sufficient number of sufficiently apt individuals to undertake so honorable an office. The having served in such office might and should be made a necessary qualification, for the being placed in the office of Judge. The choice thus proposed to be made of a Deputy should be declared to the parties and objections received. The principal Judge should not be sitting at home unoccupied while any such Deputy of his was sitting for if such inaction were allowed two evils might follow, 1 to save his own reputation a partial Judge might assign the function in this or that particular case to some connexion of one of the parties who for the sake of the profit, from partiality, would be content to submit to the disrepute: 2 The office of principal Judge might moreover be converted into a sinecure. In case of sickness such power of deputation is matter of absolute necessity.
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  • Title: [1823 Feb. 28 Greece. J.B's Observations]
    Description: 1823 Feb. 28

    Greece. J.B's Observations etc

    Judiciary resumed

    To exclude partiality and all suspicion of it, it should be a declared object of endeavour to keep the Judge clear of all local connection in the way of interest or sympathy, hence it should be a general rule that no Judge should continue such in any one district for any long time, say for more 3 years, nor be appointed Judge in any district in which he already has connexions of a certain description, to be specified, and his being known or suspected to have subsequently formed any such connexions, may be stated as warrantable grounds for a proposition for his displacement as above but no such connexion should be stated as a necessary efficient cause for his displacement and provision might be made by means of which in pursuance of a desire not much short of universal expressed by his justiciables, his continuance in that district might be prolonged.

    As to the composition of the Jury, the exclusion of two evils, viz. partiality to the prejudice of the party in the right, vexation by attendance to the injury of the Jurors themselves, will be the leading ends in view. To secure a majority, the number should in every case be odd: less therefore than three it can not be. The greater the number more than three, the more extended the vexation. For securing impartiality, and thus far appropriate moral aptitude, not indeed to a certainty, that being impossible but the best possible chance in favour of it, appointment by lot (provided the numbers of those included in the Lottery be sufficiently ample and indiscriminately taken) will suffice: for augmenting the chance of appropriate intellectual aptitude, viz. knowledge and judgment, the following course may be taken. The whole number of individuals in the district liable to serve as Jurors, divide into two classes - viz. the more erudite and the less erudite: for a Jury of three, take one from the more erudite class: to the influence of understanding on understanding, where moral inaptitude is not suspected, trust for his opinions being taken as a guide by his less erudite colleagues.

    In
  • Title: [1823. Feb y. 28. Greece. J.B's Observations]
    Description: 1823. Feb y. 28.

    Greece. J.B's Observations on particular Articles.

    Judiciary resumed

    Oh weakness! Oh inconsistency! You have given yourselves a rule of action accommodated to your own interests on the Constitutional branch of the field of Law, you leave it to your natural and irreconcileable enemies to plunder you under the cloak of an imaginary rule of action, imported from a foreign and enslaved country, a system of fiction accommodated to their own particular and sinister interests to the sacrifice of your's.

    In
  • Title: [1823 Feb y. 28. Greece. J.B's Observations]
    Description: 1823 Feb y. 28.

    Greece. J.B's Observations on particular Articles.

    Judiciary resumed

    In every Judicial District, there will, in the most prosperous state of human nature, be but too many who, being by the inaptitude opposite to appropriate intellectual and appropriate active aptitude, laid under an incapacity of giving adequate support to their own cause, even on the supposition of the justice of it, will be at the same time lying under the inability of finding, if ever, in sufficient time, an adequate gratuitous advocate. For persons thus situated, there seems an indispensable necessity of providing a pair of official advocates, one for each side of the cause. Call the one the pursuer's advocate general: call the other, the defender's advocate General. On the part of The Judge, no degree of appropriate aptitude in all its branches that in his place can be realized or so much as imagined, can supersede altogether the demand for assistance in those other shapes. In causes of the simplest nature, yes: but in causes of a certain degree of complexity, no: in this or that instance, a necessity will arise for such communication and such arrangement of Documents as the time of the Judge could not suffice for. Moreover, the inexorable and predetermined impartiality of the Judge would scarcely be compatible with the reception of that unrestrained confidence, of which the case of a party, how compleatly soever in the right, may occasionally have need. By the single-seatedness of every Judicatory as contrasted with the many-seatedness so generally established - by this single-seatedness, combined with the gratuitousness of the service rendered by deputies, room will be left for reconciling the allotment of sufficient salaries to these two subsidiary functionaries, with a reduction in the expence of the whole of the establishment, as compared with that with which it would be charged by hitherto-established usage. To these two functionaries should also be given the power of appointing unpaid deputies: neither in these situations, any more than in that of Judge, is man exempt from sickness. To the faculty of enlarging and contracting itself as need requires, may be given the appellation of elasticity: needful as is this quality, never till Bentham wrote did any such conception as that of planting it in the Judicial Establishment, enter into the head of any as yet known publicist.

    Proper