1823 Feb y. 28.

Greece. J.B's Observations on particular Articles

Judicial Procedure

In Judicature, where there is no publicity, there is no justice: no tolerably adequate security for the giving due execution and effect to the laws, whatsoever they may be. That justice should have been the object where the doors of a Judicatory have been kept regularly closed, is not possible. The object of the arrangement has been, the sacrifice of the universal interest of all men in the character of justiciables, to the particular and sinister interest either of the Judge, or of the despot whose creature and Instrument he is, or both together. Judicature has for its only right and proper ends, these: main and positive end, giving execution and effect to the Laws, whatsoever they may be: collateral and negative ends, avoidance of all needless delay, expence, and vexation in other shapes: all needless delay is injustice while it lasts.

Judiciary resumed

The class of persons in which it is desirable that Judges be chosen, is that of Judge-deputes, as above - viz. such by which, in the discharge of that function, the highest degree of appropriate aptitude, in its several branches, has been manifested: the class of persons in which it is desirable that Judges should not be chosen, is that of hireling advocates. In the breast of the hireling advocate, the chance of inaptitude, in that shape in which it is opposed to appropriate moral aptitude, is at its maximum: it amounts to a moral certainty. He lets himself out to hire indiscriminately to the party injured, or the injurer, to the guiltless man unjustly accused, or the malefactor, according as he happens to be retained: but it is uniformly on the side of the party in the wrong, that his predilection ranges itself. In the party who, being in the wrong, is conscious of his being so, he looks for his best Customer; and, in case of success: the more flagrantly his client is in the wrong, the more illustrious the triumph of his advocate: the more conspicuous the proof afforded of the union of appropriate active, with appropriate intellectual aptitude, with reference to the function of defeating the ends of Justice. Whatsoever falshood or insincerity in any other shape the advocate has occasion to defile himself with, the deluded public suffers him to scrape off from his own shoulders, and lay upon those of his client: his whole life is thereby a life of falshood and insincerity. Exclusions applied to the faculty of giving testimony, on the ground of moral inaptitude, are, if ever sincerely intended, a very foolishly devised instrument for avoidance of mendacity and thence of deception and injustice.

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