SCARCITY OF JUDGES

Southland Times, Issue 20044, 4 December 1926, Page 4

SCARCITY OF JUDGES

ANOTHER FRENCH PROBLEM. “NO LONGER A LIVING WAGE.” A difficulty has arisen in connection with the Courts in France. There are not enough judges to go round. In the ranks of the French judiciary no fewer than 97 places stand vacant. Hie natural and indignant reflection of the layman is that there must be amazing negligence in the dispensers of legal patronage, says the London Daily Telegraph. The mere rumour of a vacancy, though it be only in a County Court, or as the French would say among the juges de paix, should surely be enough to set wheels turning and wheels within wheels. ...

There have been cases in Britain in which Governments have had difficulty in making appointments of all sorts, from County Court to Woolsack. Their troubles arose not from lack of candidates, but from an embarrassment of many claims, or at least of gentlemen who could and would be unpleasant if their claims were not honoured. England has contrived to exist without a Lord Chancellor before now, but when a Cabinet has put the Great Seal into commission it has been rather because it could not dare make a choice or because it could not endure the obvious man than because there was not one to hand.

The imagination of the Englishman fails to conceive a country which would have 97 vacancies in its judiciary and confess that nobody fit wanted to take one of them. In the words of the Minister of Justice, there is “a disquieting falling off both in the quantity and in the quality” of the candidates. The Telegraph remarks:— “Our insular minds can hardly grasp it. How many briefless barristers are there in the Temple who would be perfectly willing, nay eager, to sit on any Bench from the Court of Appeal to the Police Court tomorrow ? But this is a country in which judges are appointed from the serried ranks of the Bar. In France, as elsewhere on the Continent, the judges never were advocates, they are from first to last officials. Civil servants. Between the advocate and the Bench there is an impassable gulf. No doubt much may be said for this system, though English barristers do not incline to think so. “The familiar fact that a useful party politician, or even an effective advocate, may make a very poor judge is held to be an inconsiderable dtefect in the British system compared with the general rule that success at the Bar gives a judge a training and an authority which could not be otherwise obtained. But the most striking difference between the English judge who was a barrister and the French judge who is always and for ever a Civil servant is in salary. It is not unknown for a judge of the High Court to hint that his stipend was fixed in an age when £5OOO went farther than now it does. But his opposite number in France is on a much more frugal scale. “The reason why M. Barthou cannot find candidates is understood to be that the French judiciary no longer offers a living wage. When we consider that the ambition of the population in all civilised countries for Government appointments is seen at its keenest in France, it seems probable that the Republic has been trying to get its justice a cood deal too cheap.”