Conversations and Speeches

• Author: Albert Fiadjoe
• Profession: Professor of Public Law at the University of the West Indies and a former Dean of Law
• Pages: 78-123

78 | Telford Georges: A Legal Odyssey

CONVERSATIONS AND SPEECHES

This chapter is devoted to drawing out Telford Georges on some

controversial aspects of our legal system.

Approach to Judging

Q: What do you consider to be the most important attributes of a

judge?

A: The most important attributes of a judge are to be fair, and to

have the ability to assimilate the facts. I always say that judges did

their work before formal rules were invented, and they decided

cases and satisfied people. The people looked at what they did

and constructed rules. That is my view of judging. Basically, as a

judge what I want to do is to impress people in front of me that I

am listening to them and absorbing, and later I would give a fair

and reasonable decision, which may not please them, but even

the critic would have to agree has a point. Having done that, I

would sit at home and write it out in a way that I think would

satisfy the critics. I am always thinking of the critics–they are my

targets.

My colleagues used to laugh at me that I like to write a judgment

to convince the side that loses. How can I do that? Basically, it is

the ideal that I pursue. This ties in with my basic philosophy of

life. I have no faith, so I must hold on to reason. People who have

faith pick a side. That’s what they do. They believe it is very

seldom that people who act out of greed, act rationally. You are

shocked at what they do. The problem with the law is that you

tend not to be completely fair to the person who tends not to be

reasonable and acts quixotically. The quixotic, apparently

unreasonable party is the one who gets the short end of the stick.

Conversations and Speeches | 79

Q: Did you always have an ambition to become a judge?

A: I would not use the word “ambition” but as soon as I became a

lawyer I knew that I would have liked to become a judge. The

great pleasure with being a judge is that you can decide which

side prevails. Because of my temperament and lack of faith, there

is always an element of doubt in my mind. It is people who have

great faith who are certain. If you depend on reason alone, there

is always a nagging doubt somewhere in your mind. Eventually

you have to make decisions. I found my period as an academic

very, very helpful. Indeed, when I went back on the Bench I was

a much better judge than I had been before. The reason is very

simple. When you have been a judge for a long time, you become

impatient if you feel something is being put in your way which is

not useful. So you shake the fellow up a bit: ‘Let’s get on.’ In

academia, you change a bit. You learn that the most ridiculous

thing that is said, which as a judge you might dismiss, might

after all have some merit in it. You may need to look at it more

carefully than you at first thought. So I went back with that

approach to listening, and found it helped me a lot.

Q: Speaking of judges and judging, do you remember a judge in the

Cayman Islands called Sir John Summerfield? Did you know him?

A: Yes, very well. When I first went as a Court of Appeal judge to

Bermuda, he was Chief Justice there. He was an extremely

knowledgeable judge. He was an Englishman of the old colonial

school.

Q: What would you say was his main contribution to law in the region?

A: That’s difficult to say. What I would say of him is that it was

seldom that you could find reasons for upsetting his judgments.

He was very thorough in his analysis of the problem, and he

expressed himself in as few words as possible. He was also a

quick worker.

80 | Telford Georges: A Legal Odyssey

Q: He was also in East Africa, wasn’t he?

A: He worked in Kenya. But he was well above the average sort of

judge you get in those places. Yes, Summerfield was very good.

and he would go straight to the judgment. But now I suppose you

might decide to take a walk with the dog; just put it off, put it off,

put it off!

Q: Why is there this problem with delivery of judgments?

A: I don’t know. It’s really a terrible problem. When I first became a

judge I always used to fix a date to deliver the judgment as soon as

I finished a case. On one or two occasions, I failed. But as that

date approached I would not call the lawyers before me but I

would write to them and tell them to come on a fixed date about

two weeks from that date and I would be ready by then. It was my

rule that a judgment must not be delayed for more than three

weeks from the close of the case.

Q: Practitioners in the Caribbean are always complaining about long

delayed judgments.

A: It’s not only the local judges who have this problem, you know.

There was a chap of Welsh extraction in the colonial civil service

called Smith. He was Chief Justice of the Bahamas. There were

two in between him and me. He did a case. And six years after he

did the case, he was about to retire and he had done nothing

about it. The parties harassed him. He wrote a judgment which

neither side could understand, so they accepted it!

Q: So if jurisdictions introduce new procedural rules based on case

management, how are judges who have such a bad track record

of delays in writing judgments going to cope with running things

to a tight schedule?

A: The problem, as I see it, is not merely one of management. It

springs in part from the traditional view of the judge being

perceived as a species of absolute monarch in the Court over

which he or she presides. As a young practitioner I have heard

judges refer to the Court over which they presided as “their Court”.