C.O.
12279
ENCLOSURE 2
Read
515
COPY
9th March, 1899
My dear Chief Justice,
I do not think I can usefully be present at the proposed meeting of the Profession this afternoon. If I attended it would be with a view to moving the previous question, i.e. whether it is or is not desirable that the Chief Justice of the Colony, practically the sole interpreter of the law, should himself take an active part in the making of the law. I do not think it is. The Chief Justice was mainly removed from the Legislative Council for that reason. Of course there were other reasons but that was one. I admit that there is precedent for the judges framing laws regulating procedure and a certain amount of justification for it, but it is one thing for the whole body of the Judges in England to concur in framing rules of Procedure, another, for a sole Judge in a distant Colony, far removed from Judicial assistance and counsel to be himself the maker and the Interpreter of the Law to have to sit in Judgment on the law he has himself made. If there was any necessity for it, as there is for your sitting in judgment on yourself in the local Court of Appeal, I should not object, but in regard to preparing a new Code there is no such need. It is not your function or duty. There is the Attorney General whose proper work it is. There are plenty of other persons to do the work.