The Address from the Justice Service

The address given by Lord Justice Andrew Popplewell at the Justice Service on Sunday 12 October:

The reading we had from the prophet Micah includes, in the King James translation, the passage: “what doth the LORD require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?”

Justice, Mercy, Humility. I propose to offer a few personal thoughts on the third of these, humility. Humility in the business of judging and how that relates to humility more widely in society.

I do so with the cautionary words of GK Chesterton in my ears: “I may not practice what I preach but God forbid I should preach what I practice”.

Judges are not generally famed for their humility. When Queen Victoria was to open the new Law Courts in 1882, the draft of a speech by Lord Selborne LC had the passage “conscious as Your Majesty’s Judges are of their own infirmities…”; when the draft was considered by the Council of Judges, Lord Justice Bowen suggested that it should be amended to say “conscious as Your Majesty’s Judges are of each other’s infirmities.”

I have three points.

First, and perhaps most obviously, judging requires a constant self-awareness of how little we know and understand. We should all have a sign on the bench in front of us with the words of William Cowper:

“Knowledge is proud that he has learned so much

Wisdom is humble that he knows no more.”

Moreover the job by its very nature can and should be a regular reminder of our own fallibilities. In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus said "Judge not, that ye be not judged". At first sight an uncomfortable saying for Judges. But delivering judgments in cases, which is what we do for a living, is not the same as being judgemental.

Criminal trials involve a whole cast of players not just defendants and victims, but also prosecutors, witnesses, advocates, and jurors. So too do civil trials. All human life is there, and it is theatre, not in the sense of actors performing artifice, but as in the best dramas as something which illuminates character, for better or worse. My experience has been, and this may perhaps surprise some of you, that it reveals how well people behave most of the time. Where they do not, it is possible to pass judgment that they have failed to meet the standards expected by society without assuming that we would have behaved differently if we had had their very different backgrounds and personal circumstances. The longer I have been doing it the less judgemental I find myself becoming. If we keep an open mind we can see the personality behind the circumstances.

Secondly, judicial humility involves a recognition that doing justice in every single case is an ambitious aspiration.

Wesley Carr, the one time Dean of Westminster used to say that the Church of England was full of half believers. Richard Collier, the curate at Fring in North Norfolk, sometimes talks in his sermons of pursuing the possibility of God. Whether or not that resonates with church congregations, some may argue that it is apt to talk of Judges pursuing the possibility of justice.

Many Judges will tell you, and I would agree, that in civil trials the hardest part of the job is not the law, but the facts: deciding what happened, or, as is often important what people knew or intended.

Getting the right answer is bound up with the variables of speed and cost. When the Normans introduced trial by battle, by the law of averages they will have got the right result in about 50% of cases. If we heard each side’s version of events the day after they happened, and asked some questions we would do better, but still get it wrong in some cases. Now we take much longer and have disclosure of documents, now vastly proliferated by being in digital form, cross examination of witnesses in court, and usually the benefit of argument from advocates on both sides. But there are cases in which even after the most meticulous examination of all conceivably relevant material, the apparently reliable evidence pulls in different directions and there seems to be something wrong with each potential solution.

And importantly, speed and cost are themselves aspects of doing justice. Justice delayed is justice denied as the adage goes. And access to the courts which is dependent on means works against justice for all.

Where the right balance lies between delay, cost and the result is a matter for debate, and a topic for another day. The point I am seeking to make is that, as in any court system, we are striving for justice, striving in what is an ambitious aspiration. We would do well to acknowledge that, in the manner in which we behave in court, which is itself an aspect of justice; in the way we express our judgments; and in our public acceptance that it is so.

Third, and last, I offer a personal view on the nature of humility, not just in the day job but more widely in civil society. It is that humility and love of self are intimately connected, and that getting the balance between the two is key.

You might be thinking that love of self is the antithesis of humility, but by love of self I do not mean being pleased with oneself, although that is not unknown as a judicial trait.

Love of self, or as psychologists might call it self-esteem, is an ability to love ourselves in full awareness of our weaknesses and failings, and with a mental post it note reading “must do better”.We know we are all flawed: As Leonard Cohen sang:

“Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack, a crack, in everything; its how the light gets in” .

But we also know that low self-esteem can be debilitating; self-loathing is destructive. However full and perfect our understanding of our weaknesses and failings, it is unhelpful if all it leads to is emotional and intellectual self-flagellation.

The New Testament tells us how God loves a sinner who repents. To digress for a moment, I can’t help feeling that the word sin has been wrongly equiparated with wickedness and iniquity, not just by the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church but by the words of absolution in the book of Common Prayer, encouraged perhaps by Psalm 51, known to Tudor felons as the “the neck verse” (see the High Sherriff afterwards if you don’t know why). The word for sin in the new testament is the Greek Hamarta, which simply means missing the mark in throwing a spear at a target. So too does chet, which is the Hebrew word which comes down to us translated as sin in the old testament. In the Lord’s prayer, the Greek word for trespass, paraptoma, has a similar derivation: literally falling beside something.

But however that may be, if God loves a sinner who repents, who are we to deny ourselves such love?

This love of self is the last of the four degrees of love advocated by St Bernard of Clairvaux, who you will remember preached the Second Crusade in 1146, the year after this Cathedral was completed. The Cathedral has fared rather better than the Crusade did. The four degrees of love are in this order:

love of self for self’s sake;

love of God for self’s sake;

love of God for God’s sake;

love of self for God’s sake.

So I finish with this thought: Is humility, perhaps, a combination of self-knowledge and a love of self for God’s sake?