WHEN JUDGES ARE AT THEIR BEST.

Dominion, Volume 6, Issue 1789, 30 June 1913, Page 11

WHEN JUDGES ARE AT THEIR BEST.

1 FROM 65 TO 80. THE LORD CIIIEF JUSTICE'S EVIDENCE. Views of Judges on the question of an age limit for their own retirement uro contained in a British Blue-book issued last month, recording the minutes of evidenco before the Royal Commission on delay in tho King's Bench Division. Tho Lord Chief Justice (Lord Alveratone), replying to the chairman, Lord St. Aldwyn, said: "I should certainly not retire a Judge as long as ho can do his work. lam quite satisfied that the best years of tho Judges' lives in my lifetime have been tho last; ton years of their work. You want to learn to be a Judee. It is astonishingly difficult; a man may bo a great,lawyer and yet not a great Judge, and a man may be a poor lawyer and yet be an excellent Judge. Judgs are appointed much younger now than they used to' bo, but tlio great men I have known havo done their best work between the ages of eixtyrfive and eighty, or certainly between sixty-five and seventy-fivo. "Look at the last Lord Chancellor but one (Lord Halsbury), the best president in tho House of Lords I have ever practised before. Just think of tho loss to the public it would have been if ho could not have exercised judicial functions after the ogo of seventy, twenty years of admirable public work. 'Strangely 'enough, Mr. Justice Manisty was appointed to «ucceed Baron Martin at tho ago at which Baron Martin was retiring." Mr. Justice Phillimore was asked by Sir Edwin Cornwall if ho thought a Judge should retiro at sixty-five. Mr. Justice Phillimore: I do not. I am more than sixty-five myself. There are a number of our great Civil Servants who havo retired and are doing largo commercial work at this moment. Do not you think you might get over somo of the difficulties'of arrangement if younger men wero always appointed?—Oh, dear, no. I do a great deal move work now. The work I do is so hard that if I was a younger man I could not do it. Sir Charles Henry: Aro you in favour of seventy being the retiring ago unless the lord Chancellor thinks otherwise?—l think seventy is too early. I believe that nowadays tho whole vitality of people is so enormously prolonged sinco wo were children. Replying to Sir Edwin Cornwall, Mr, Justice Phillimore said he thought that sixty-five, with our modern vitality, was too early for Civil Servants to retire.