How do judges make decisions?

Victor

https://www.irishtimes.com/crime-law/courts/2022/07/27/wikipedia-articles-20-more-likely-to-influence-legal-reasoning-of-irish-judges-scientists-find/

I was planning to make this thread anyway, but this article came up. I'm thinking more towards the non-criminal cases.

Both sides of a case will present evidence, make their arguments, cite precedents, etc. Are judges reliant on these as prompts or will a judge (and whatever staff they have) go away and make their own enquiries, possibly going down rabbit holes that either side didn't necessarily want looked at?

So:

How do Irish judges make decisions?

Typically, what staff are available to judges?

Jim2007

Garbage is the word that comes to mind.

The research completely fails to indicate that any false article was ever cited as the underlying reason for a decision and that it was upheld on appeal in an Irish court. Furthermore it completely fails to take into account the entire process of court including the advocacy role of the legal representatives in presenting the legal argument to the courts.

One bunch of students validating the activities of another bunch of students without any reference to a real case of a miscarriage of justice in a process that is supposedly going on for what 10 years or more does not amount to a hill of beans.

Serious research would involve determining if judgments exist that were based on false or misleading articles, that barristers commonly quote false and misleading legal texts etc. When you can’t present some cases of this in the real world, the research is suspect.

UrbanVixen

Judges decide two issues in contested cases. They are the arbiters of law and of the facts.

Judges find on the basis of what is argued in front of them and the law as argued and as known to the judge. A judge cannot simply accept a legal argument however persuasive it might be. They must make a judicial determination on the merits of a legal argument. The judge is ultimately responsible for the decision that issues over their signature and some of them hate being overturned on appeal 😒.

Judges do get it wrong at times. That is why it is so helpful in civil cases that you can appeal much more easily than in some criminal cases.

Claw Hammer

Quite often written submissions are made by the parties in a case. These may well include text sourced from Wikipaedia or wherever. Some judges, when they agree with a legal point made, may well repeat the argument made to them in the judgement, effectively cutting and pasting relevant passages from the submission.

You're probably expecting too much to think judges, all educated in south Dublin's incestuous, Anglocentric, Papist taliban fee-charging schools, would have the openmindedness to read an entire Wikipedia article, especially one which references how things are done in exotic places beyond Mother England. That narrow, insular little world and its abundance of finely snortled prejudice cannot be overlooked, but it very much is. The shocking fact that entire areas of the judiciary in effect operate in secret - most obviously family law - should worry any Irish person who genuinely cares about democratic accountability, openness and justice. These judges can destroy lives, and only if somebody has the considerable financial resources to bring the case higher will they be overruled (but never exposed or held to account if it's an 'in camera' case, of course).

Imagine if judges in our family courts, most especially of all, were to read the following on a Wikipedia article, "Due to legal reforms, equal parenting time (EPT) laws in Spain now apply to approximately 40% of all divorces..." [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shared_parenting#Frequency]

Never mind 40%; has a single Irish judge ever ruled in favour of such parental equality? Highly unlikely but we don't actually know because their judgements are in secret (with few exceptions, highlighted by Róisín O'Shea and Carol Coulter's respective, albeit now quite dated, research) We can't be having those godless continental European practices of parental equality in practice (as opposed to the legal fiction of joint legal custody) undermining women in good Irish Catholic homes in 2022! First, these Spanish communists (ahem, ahem) give fathers equal rights to parent their own children. What next, equal rights to fathers to the family home and no more bedsits? Down with Wikipedia's subervision of Irish family values!

Yours,

the judges of Ireland's family courts, still dancing at the crossroads like it's 19...37.

macvin

pity people don't read the full report or journalists don't give a fair and balanced report. But that wouldn't suit the narrative of a sensationalist headline especially what the indo wrote.

The authors of the research stated very clearly that the wiki entries were used as a prompt and that in all the decisions that used the examples, details of the cases that were not mentioned in wki were in the determinations. Therefore whist wiki might have given a steer to a case, the judges still read the case files in order to understand the judgement and di not go by what wiki said.

But giving this pertinent and important aspect of the research is beyond the capabilities of the second rate journalism we have in the country these days

hullaballoo

It's an interesting thought isn't it, that various pieces of legal writing on the same topic could mention the same cases.