On 3 January 2011 22:36, Nick Bull <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi, > > I've spent the day scraping information from Appeal Court judgements, in an > attempt to find a metric for judges' performance. > > For your interest and amusement[*], here's a snapshot of how far I've got > with it: > > http://www.duffdevices.org/ratemyjudge/ > > Has anyone else looked at this area? The most painful part is extracting > the data from paragraphs of English text; are there any tips/techniques for > approaching this, other than "don't" of course? >
Its the kind of analysis that is quite common (I believe) in the United States, but less common here. That is partly because many judges are political (or democratic) appointments, whereas most of ours could not even loosely be described as such. Thus in the US there is much interest in the political "leaning" of a judge and that is why the school of judicial realism is particularly strong over there. I don't know of anyone who does it here. That must partly be because tools to do so are only now easily available, but also because it may be of limited use. That is why I'm a little unhappy about: "This site is about judges' job performance" A decision overturned on appeal is not necessarily a criticism of the judge's performance. Ignoring cases where additional evidence is admitted on appeal (where the court could not possibly have considered it), an appeal may succeed because the court of appeal takes a different view from the judge as to the way the law should be applied. That doesn't mean the first instance judge was wrong. The Court of Appeal (Criminal Division) controls which appeals are then allowed to the Supreme Court, so it is much harder to check whether the second line are really right. There are well known cases where a lower level judge has had to persist in deciding in a particular way in order to persuade the courts above to see sense. Its hard to criticise a judge who (for example) makes a decision in the light of authority, but that authority is changed by a superior court (cf the House of Lords complete and speedy volte-face in R v Shivpuri against their own decision in Anderton v Ryan). See (for one of your examples): http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWCA/Crim/2010/130.html. I think the basic problem is that it is *not* a judge's job to be right. Even in criminal cases. We simply don't have the time and money to deliver correct judgments 100%. Sorry, but that's reality. One aspect of this is that judges are not required or supposed to carry out extensive legal research of their own. The way our courts work is that a judge has to take guidance from the parties or their representatives. It may be that the state of the law is wholly misrepresented to the judge by (incompetent, conniving or just badly advised) parties, who then makes an incorrect decision. The judge was doing their job, but they may be speedily overturned on appeal. Reading an appeal decision its clear when judges are really being criticised (and to what degree). For example the now retired HHJ Cotran was very trenchantly criticised in: http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWCA/Civ/2006/281.html who alluded to earlier criticism of the same judge in: http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWCA/Civ/2004/434.html It would be great to pick up that sort of case and find ways to remove judges who behave in such an awful fashion. I'm just not happy about finding judges who do their jobs properly but (for whatever reason) have decisions overturned on appeal. I appreciate you are focussing on the criminal division which will mostly be appeals against directions, which may be closer to the mark. -- Francis Davey _______________________________________________ Mailing list [email protected] Archive, settings, or unsubscribe: https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/mailman/listinfo/developers-public
