THE EDWARD’S CASE.

Temuka Leader, Issue 2382, 14 July 1892, Page 4

THE EDWARD’S CASE.

The following particulars, dated London, May 27, are to hand by way of Sydney:— Lord Herschell, in delivering the judgment of their lordships in this case, observed that the question raised was one of grave importance, the contention on the part of the respondent being that as the law stood in New Zealand the Governor had the power of adding without limit to the number of the judges of the Supreme Court of the colony without express parliamentary sanction, and in the absence of any parliamentary provision for the salaries of the judges so appointed. Both sides had placed reliance on the law which had prevailed in England governing the appointment of judges, but their lordships did not propose to deal with that subject in detail, as it could only have an indirect bearing on the question to be determined, which must depend upon the construction of certain New Zealand statutes. Having referred to the circumstances at much length, their lordships thought that the Act only vested in the Governor the appointment of judges to whom an ascertained salary was payable by law at the time of their appointment. They would humbly advise Her Majesty that the judgment of the Court of Appeal of New Zealand should be reversed, and judgement on the motion entered for the AttorneyGeneral. Under the peculiar circumstances of the case, they did not think the respondent should be ordered to pay the costs of the court below or of that appeal. The Times has a leading article on teh subject, in which it says A grave constitutional question destined it may be to affect the rights and liberties of thousands of British subjects for generations to come, was quietly determined on Saturday by the judgment of the Privy Council in Buckley v. Edwards. The controversy sprang from a problem which has perplexed all the free nations of the world, and for which Englishmen alone have known how to provide a satisfactory solution. The tenure and payment of the judges of the Supreme Court of New Zealand, and the relations of the Judiciary to the Executive and Legislature, were all involved in this important case. No more delicate and difficult matters are to be found within the entire domain of constitutional law. It needed the sustained labours of many generations of Englishmen to devise and build up the barriers which have placed the integrity of our courts above suspicion. There is nothing in all our institutions of which we are more justly proud than the absolute independence of the judicial bench, and there is none of our traditions which we would more gladly see reproduced and perpetuated in the great communities which it has been our destiny to found in distant lands. No other people has known how to implant in the breasts of all its citizens that entire confidence in the law which all Englishmen repose in it, and the secret of that implicit trust lies in the position which the Constitution has long given to the judges. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that had the Privy Council felt constrained to decide the point raised in Buckley v. Edwards otherwise than they did, their judgment would have inflicted a disastrous blow on the independence of the judiciary of New Zealand. From that calamity the colony has fortunately been spared; but the fact that the contentions of the respondent were upheld by three judges to two in the colonial Court of Appeal, and the language used by Lord Herschell in several passages of hisjudgment, show how real and how serious was the danger which hung over it. Judges, however,

are not free to determine points of law in accordance with their own views of what the law ought to bo. In spite of the serious dangers of the future both of the courts and of the Legislature of New Zealand ■which the establishment of the respondent’s contention must have caused, the Judicial Committee would have been driven to pronounce in his fa vor had the wording of the statutes under their consideration borne the construction placed upon them by the colonial court. The legal reasoning by which their lordships were enabled to reach the conclusion that the majority of the court below were mistaken, depended upon the interpretation of a whole series of colonial jurisprudence and Acts sufficiently complicated to show that colonial jurisprudence is only too closely modelled on that of the mother country. It is, fortunately, not necessary to follow the elaborate judgment delivered by Lord Herschell here. It is enough to know that in the result, the court is clearly of opinion that the Attorney-General of New Zealand has made out his case, and that there is no power to appoint new judges without the assent of Parliament vested in the Governor, or to appoint judges at all without providing for the payment of them of the statutory aalary.”