THE JUDICIARY BILL.

Dominion, Volume 1, Issue 10, 7 October 1907, Page 4

THE JUDICIARY BILL.

Ar,though the Judiciary Bill, which _ the Government introduced in the Legislative' Council on Friday, proposes to sweep away the District Court system, and to effect pome very material changes in the machinery of the Court of Appeal, it proposes nothing in variation of the . existing dispensation of justice. From the beginning it was only a question of time when the District Court system would be discarded. In the past, no doubt, the District Courts served a useful purpose in taking charge of business that, by lightness on the one hand and gravity on the other, appeared proper to be, excluded respectively from the concern of the Supreme Court Judge and the Magistrate. It has always been an anomaly, but probably never an injustice, that our judicial system should declare a kind of borderland between the lower court and the upper, and the formal renunciation of the District Court system is a perfectly natural affirmation of the principle that the best judicial system is the simple one that shuns ' the . multiplication of grades. The second part of,the Bill, that which practically reconstructs the territorial disposition of the Supreme Court, is not so easily to be taken as a' matter of course.

The new proposals, originating from the rather scrambling organisation of the work of the Judges, are, briefly, the enclosure of each Judge's activity within the boundary of his own district, and. the appointment as a fixed Court of Appeal of three Judges assigned to the Wellington district. The immediate result this change will be, of course, to relieve the outside districts of that plague of judicial arrears which springs from the serious inroads made upon the time of all the Judges by the obligation of their attendance at the Court of Appeal. So much is clear gain, but the new machinery does not make a 'dean sweep of the arrears trouble, for the business .of the local Supreme Court will suffer all the existing intermission,?. Moreover, since the Bill makes it explicit that no Judge may sit on appeal against any judgment of Ms own, and since, also, a proportion of the appeals will be appeals from Wellington judgments, it would seem that the Appeal Court bench will always require one of the Judges from the outside district to fill a vacant place. The permanent presence of three Judges in Wellington, instead of two, will probably give some relief against the first of these difficulties, and, as for the other,' it cannot well he avoided. Clause 12, which permits ligitahts to forward written arguments on appeal from one of the lower courts to the ( Appeal Court, will probably effect little in the way of saving a Judge's time, for litigants are. unlikely to abandon their reliance on the personal advocacy of counsel, or avail themselves of a method which holds no defence against unanticipated arguments from the other side.

The most important clause in the Bill is that which establishes tho three Wellington Judges as the Court of Appeal. The chief I objections which might be raised I against this innovation are two- | fold. In the first place, since Judges disagree, there is more satisfaction in a majority taken from the widest arbitrament than in one taken from the narrowest. In the second place, any selection that is made must involve an 1 undesired differentiation of persons. We recognise that these are contentions not quite free from a certain speculativeness, and, therefore, not wholly valid until experiment has turned speculation into fact. They are, nevertheless,; points deserving very full consideration by the Legislature.