Lord Neuberger provides advice on judgments
Judges should make shorter and clearer judgments, Lord Neuberger, the president of the Supreme Court has said.
Giving the annual Bailii lecture, he recommended that judges insert a short summary at the start, include guidance on the structure and content, keep it short and limit the use of dissenting or concurring judgments unless they help the reader to understand the leading one. Judgments should be accessible to retain public confidence in the justice system, he said, and this was particularly important given the increase in self-represented litigants.
He advised that judgments “should be sufficiently well-written to enable interested and reasonably intelligent non-lawyers to understand who the parties were, what the case was about, what the disputed issues were, what decision the judge reached, and why that decision was reached”.
