A few years ago I wrote a post on whether adjudicators should act judicially, which looked at a talk by Lord Hamilton, who was then the president of the Scottish Court of Session. Lord Hamilton posited the question, “What has acting judicially to do with adjudicators?”, and I considered a number of the judicial values that he referred to, concluding that I hoped that all adjudicators had something of those values in mind whenever they accepted an adjudication appointment.
This post came to mind when I was reading the Court of Appeal’s judgment in Shaw v Grouby, where one of the defendants’ grounds of appeal was related to whether, because of the way the judge conducted the trial, it had been fair. It all boiled down to whether the judge’s interventions with witnesses meant he was “entering the arena”, which cast doubt over his objectivity and impartiality, and raised the prospect of the witnesses being unable to fairly put their evidence before the court. Continue reading
