development in legal education in Hong Kong in which the Law Journal, the University of Hong Kong and the legal profession are co-operating.
This deserves to prosper.
5.
The difficulties
induction of newly appointed judges.
of inexperience are not limited to the The aggregated qualifications of
Nor
Some
judges never truly match the varying demands of court business. should the wishes and sometimes the needs of judges be ignored.
know when they need a change; others grow stale. The stress of some types of work over a long period is especially bad for certain judges. They are likely to perform better if given a change and perhaps even to
live longer.
6.
A further and important argument is that there ought to be a
degree of versatility in the system sufficient to enable work to be
shifted from judge to judge as necessary in the public interest. A system is not matching resources to demand if a judge sits in his room
while a case in a state of readiness, which he could conveniently try,
has to wait. And what is more important is that the total throughput
of work can be managed efficiently at an appropriate and predictable
pace if it can be assumed that a given degree of versatility is exploitable. This does not mean that all judges need be versatile.
7.
These points in favour of a means of filling the experience
gap which in summary are
(a)
(b)
-:
the ability to select the best judges from
the recruitment field rather than only those
with experience in particular fields or in
advocacy,
the capacity to match finite judicial
resources to the needs of court business,
(c) opportunities to give a judge a change of
work,
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