The Magistrate's Tale by Trevor Grove

Author:Trevor Grove
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2002-03-09T16:00:00+00:00

8

A Jewel Beyond Price

‘The justices are chosen for their qualities of fairness, judgment and common sense’

I went to see Lord Bingham, the former Lord Chief Justice. He had recently been appointed Senior Law Lord, in part at least to deal with tricky appeals it was anticipated would emerge from the first testing few years of the Human Rights Act. Waves of legal controversy would one day pile up in the House of Lords committee rooms which would have arisen as tiny ripples in magistrates’ courts up and down the country.

Lord Bingham was already on record as a supporter of the lay magistracy, having praised it robustly in a recent speech. ‘The justices are chosen for their qualities of fairness, judgment and common sense, alert to the needs and concerns of the communities they serve and enabling local issues to be determined locally by local people,’ he said.

‘And in the eyes of the public they have one great advantage: they are free of the habits of thought, speech and bearing which characterise professional lawyers and which most people find to a greater or lesser extent repellent. The existence of 30,000 citizens distributed around the country, all with a sound, practical understanding of what the law is and how it works, is, I think, a democratic jewel beyond price.’

This was stirring stuff. I wanted to hear more. While waiting in the entrance lobby of the House of Lords I got chatting to Bernardo, the police officer on duty. He was a Galician who had settled in London and joined the Met some years ago. We were just getting onto the interesting subject of illegal immigration and the policing thereof when Lord Bingham came down to lead me up to his office. This was a fine, high-ceilinged room with heavy Puginesque curtains (‘standard House of Lords issue – my wife rather objects’) and a view over the rush-hour traffic trundling past Palace Yard.

Lord Bingham is a tallish, thinnish, donnish and very agreeable man whose entry in Who’s Who would be longer but for the modest abbreviations. ‘I’m very much in favour of the lay magistracy,’ he said firmly. ‘Obviously, efforts must be made to try to make it even better. There are problems in making an institution efficient when it is dependent on people who have got other jobs to do and have to fit it into the rest of their lives.

‘If we were inventing the system from scratch, I suspect we probably wouldn’t come up with the lay magistracy. But that isn’t an argument against it. I have repeatedly claimed that the magistracy is a democratic institution. You have a number of members of the public chosen for their qualities of fairness and good sense, general soundness and practical wisdom, exercising important judicial functions. This has the result that a large number of people in the community actually have hands-on experience of how the law works and what it’s all about and are imbued with notions of fairness, of not making your mind up until you’ve heard both sides.

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