Judge

Judge, public official vested with the authority to hear, determine, and preside over legal matters brought in a court of law.

In jury cases, the judge presides over the selection of the panel and instructs it concerning pertinent law. The judge also may rule on motions made before or during a trial. In countries with a civil-law tradition, a more active role customarily has been assigned to the judge than in countries with a common-law tradition. In civil-law courts the procedure is inquisitorial—i.e., judges do most of the questioning of witnesses and have a responsibility to discover the facts. In common-law courts the procedure is adversarial—i.e., the lawyers for each side do most of the questioning of witnesses and the presentation of evidence.

There are many kinds of judges, ranging from an untrained justice of the peace to a member of the U.S. Supreme Court or of the Court of Queen’s Bench. In the United States judges are elected or appointed. Most federal judges are appointed for life by the president with the advice or consent of the Senate. The highest-ranking judge in the U.S. legal system is the chief justice of the United States. See also judgment; judiciary; magistrates’ court; Missouri Plan.

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The role and power of judges vary enormously, not only from country to country but often within a single country as well. For example, a rural justice of the peace in the United States—often untrained in the law, serving part-time, sitting alone in everyday work clothes in a makeshift courtroom, collecting small fees or receiving a pittance for a salary, trying a succession of routine traffic cases and little else—obviously bears little resemblance to a justice of the Supreme Court of the United States—a full-time, well-paid black-robed professional, assisted by law clerks and secretaries, sitting in a marble “palace” with eight colleagues and deciding at the highest appellate level only questions of profound national importance. Yet both persons are judges.

Lay judges

In most civil-law countries, judges at all levels are professionally trained in the law, but in many other countries they are not. In England part-time lay judges greatly outnumber full-time professional judges. Called magistrates or justices of the peace, they dispose of more than 95 percent of all criminal cases and do so with general public satisfaction and the approbation of most lawyers (see magistrates’ court). Professional judges handle only the relatively small number of very serious crimes; most of their time is devoted to civil cases. England places an unusually heavy reliance on lay judges, but they are far from unknown in the courts of many other countries, particularly at the lowest trial level. This was also true in the former Soviet Union and remains so in the United States. In some countries of the Middle East (e.g., Israel and Iran), lay judges constitute religious courts and are selected for service on the basis of their knowledge of and fidelity to nonsecular rules and laws. In Finland panels of lay judges sit with credentialed judges in district court criminal cases (and may also be used in some civil cases pertaining to domestic issues). The Japanese enacted legislation in the early 21st century to introduce lay judges into the country’s legal system.

There is considerable diversity in the way lay judges are chosen and used in judicial work. In the United States, for example, lay judges are popularly elected for limited terms, whereas in England they are appointed by a Judicial Appointments Commission (subject to approval by the lord chancellor) to serve until retirement or removal. In England lay judges serve intermittently in panels on a rotating basis for short periods, whereas in the United States they sit alone and continuously. In South Africa lay judges (called assessors) always sit with professional judges; in England they sometimes do; and in the United States they never do. In some developing countries many judges at all levels have little formal legal training. Sometimes they are religious authorities rather than lawyers, since in many countries religion and secular government are not sharply differentiated, and the law derives from religious doctrine. The vast majority of countries that use lay judges at the lowest trial level, however, insist upon professionally trained judges in trial courts of general jurisdiction and in appellate courts.

Professional judges in the civil-law tradition

Professional judges in civil-law countries are markedly different in background and outlook from professional judges in common-law countries. Both have legal training and both perform substantially the same functions, but there the similarities cease. In a typical civil-law country, a person graduating from law school makes a choice between a judicial career and a career as a private lawyer. If he chooses the former and is able to pass an examination, he is appointed to the judiciary and enters service. His first assignment is to a low-level court; thereafter he works his way up the judicial ladder as far as he can until his retirement with a government pension. His promotions and assignments depend upon the way his performance is regarded by a council of senior judges or sometimes upon the judgment of the minister of justice, who may or may not exercise his powers disinterestedly and on the basis of merit. The Japanese system epitomizes this process. The path to legal success is very narrow, providing little room for error in terms of formal education, legal practice, and judicial experience. In Japan, as in the vast majority of civil-law systems, the civil-law judge is a civil servant.

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