Political Character of the Judiciary Sample Clauses

Political Character of the Judiciary. The basic concept of judicial independence as explained above should not be confused with the traditional, juristic conception of judicial decision-making as a purely value-neutral and deductive process by which general legal principles are applied to specific factual situations. This latter notion has come under considerable and legitimate academic criticism from a number of quarters. For instance, the influential Australian academic Professor Xxxxxx Xxxxx was an early critic of traditional juridical explanations of legal reasoning. His analysis of precedent and judicial decision-making argued that legal doctrine and logic did not in themselves compel particular decisions in appellate cases, but rather provided so-called ‘illusory categories of reference’, which justified decisions ultimately based on a policy choice.55 Other critics of traditional, ‘objective’ notions of judicial decision making have argued that it is the personal attitudes and values of judges, not legal principles, that are a primary, or at least significant, factor influencing judicial decision-making. Critics such as Xxxxxxxxx have thus sought to debunk the ‘traditional view’ that depicts the judge as a kind of “political, economic and social eunuch, [with] ... no interest in the world outside his court”.56 Xxxxxxxx’x analysis of the English appeal courts highlighted how English judges were guided by a particular, homogenous view of the “public interest” rooted in their professional training and socio-economic background.57 In America, judicial behaviouralists, such as Xxxxxxxx, endeavoured to quantitatively analyse the 55 see Xxxxxx Xxxxx, Precedent and Law: Dynamics of Common Law Growth (Butterworths, 1985).