Judgment

A judge would often derive great assistance from counsel’s written submissions, and there was nothing inherently wrong in his making extensive use of them, with proper acknowledgement, whether in setting out the facts or in analysing the issues or the applicable legal principles or indeed in the actual dispositive reasoning. However, where that occurred, the judge had to take care to make it clear that he or she had fully considered such contrary submissions as had been made and had brought their own independent judgment to bear. The more extensive the reliance on material supplied by only one party, the greater the risk that the judge would in fact fail to do justice to the other party’s case. However, to say that the judgment was defective, even seriously, was not necessarily to say that there had been an injustice which required an appeal to be allowed. If it was possible to demonstrate that, whatever the first impression created by the way