TWENTY-FIVE YEARS A JUDGE

Evening Star, Issue 18158, 26 December 1922, Page 2

TWENTY-FIVE YEARS A JUDGE

On October 27 Mr Justice Darling completed twenty-five years’ service as a British puisne judge, with his mental powers and wit as keen as over. _ Noone who secs and hears Darhiig J. in King’s Bench Court IV. would imagine that he has passed the allotted span of three score years and ten. Time has treated him kindly (writes Arthur H. Engelbach, in the ‘ Daily Mail ’), and, like good vintage port, he improves with age. The outcry raised by the legal profession on his appointment to the Bench by Lord Halsbury soon died down when it was seen that the Lord Chancellor’s estimate of his ability was right and the public’s wrong. His whole record on the Bench has given the lie to those of his critics who pronounced him no “lawyer,” for it is not given to many judges to have so few oi their judgments upset in the Court of Appeal. As a criminal judge he is the strongest and best wo have had for many decades, and, stern as he can ho when occasion demands it, he never forgets that justice should bo tempered with mercy. His conduct of the Stinio Morrison and Armstrong cases proved his strength as a judge. Armstrong might well have escaped conviction with a weaker judge presiding over the trial, and Stinio Morrison might well have been hanged but for the intervention of Mr Justice Darling, who was not completely satisfied that the case was fully proved against him. It is, however, as a humorist that he has endeared himself to the public, and alas! wo have been blessed with few since the days of Mathew and Bowen. A laugh is not out of place in a law court; it is a welcome relief to the often dreary proceedings, and frequently acts as a tonic to both plaintiff and defendant, for Mr Justice Darling does not joke at the expense of the litigants; it is counsel who suffer most from his quips. It is always interesting to know what a. wit considers one of his best jeux d’esprit. The following, in the judge’s opinion, ranks as one of his best: —In summing up a case and dealing with the suggestion that poets do not avail themselves of actual events and circumstances, he pointed out that Gray’s immortal lines, “Where ignorance is bliss 'tis folly to bo wise,” were naturally enough suggested by “A Distant Prospect of Eton College,” a jfest much appreciated by Etonians alike at the Bar and at. Eton itself. That Mr Justice Daxding is popular with litigants in person the following hitherto untold story tends to proveA few months ago a woman was seen hovering about the sacred precincts of the judges’ corridor in the Law Courts. She inquired for Mr Justice Darling, and, on being told he had risen for the day, she replied that she understood he “ gave free advice after 4 o’clock 1” The question of the retirement of judges is a very delicate one, and no satisfactory general rule can be made in regard to it. Mucin of the best work of our judges has been accomplished in the last eight or ten yeans of their career. No judge is born “ ready made ”; he has to learn his work, and that is a matter of time and-experience. One may be young at seventy-eight, another old at sixty. A pension is guaranteed after fifteen years’ service on the Bench, but often a judge is at the height of his powers for many years after that period, as is the case with Sir Charles Darling.