Legal challenges

The legal establishment’s hostility to a public register of judges’ interests continues.

Appearing before the Scottish Parliament’s public petitions committee, Lord Carloway, the Lord President of the Court of Session, opined: “If I were to say to senior members of the profession, ‘By the way if you wish to become a judge you will have to declare your pecuniary interests and open them to public scrutiny’ I have no doubt whatsoever that would act as a powerful disincentive from lawyers of experience and skill becoming members of the judiciary. I can assure the committee that we need them more than they need us’.”

Does he seriously expect us to believe that merely having to declare their “pecuniary interests” in the stock market, for example, would compel lawyers to reject a job for life, a fat salary and a gold mine pension?

Furthermore, if “lawyers of experience and skill” fled in droves from the prospect of a cushy career as a judge, the answer is simple: invite academic lawyers from our universities to act as judges. Their knowledge of the law is probably superior to that of “lawyers of skill and experience” and their capacity for interpreting the law appropriately is unlikely to be inferior to that of judges.

Given the fact that the UK Supreme Court, on an almost regular basis, has been obliged (when hearing appeals from the Scottish courts), to cor- rect the deficient reasoning of Scotland’s judges, we can assure Lord Carloway that they need us more than we need them.

The feeble and pervasively untenable reasoning deployed by Lord Carloway to defend the indefensible – the judiciary’s hostility to a register of their interests – entitles us, their paymaster, to ask: Who do they think they are?

THOMAS CROOKS Dundas Street, Edinburgh Your editorial on Saturday (“Justice must be seen to be even-handed ”), points to a serious defect in the quality range of barristers chosen to become judges.

As you say, the judiciary should indeed be more representative of the population – so that limits the chances of the brightest and best. How to choose some dimmer barristers, though?

BRUCE ADAM Mortley Close, Tonbridge