Judging and the Ethical Life

Abstract

This paper seeks to answer a prior question before one can look at how to measure judicial quality. That question is what is it that we expect a judge to do and to be. And that question has to be answered in the context of what we take to be what I call the ethical life of the law and of the judge. What I have argued for is that the judge stands in an anxious place, ‘the middle’, marrying both the universal law and the particular decision, cognisant of the general law and also cognisant of the particular individual or case that they encounter. The paper explores that place and how to teach the judge to use the anxiety therein creatively and not run away from it by collapsing that space into either the universal law or the particular decision.