Chief Justice of the High Court, Robert French, is calling for court cases to be time-limited to cope with “systemic problems of costs and delay” in the legal system.
Top judge wants court time limited by ‘parking meter’ system
Australia’s Chief Justice has issued a clear call for court cases to be time-limited.
His revolutionary proposal would change how justice works in Australia. Currently, there is no formal time limit on any legal hearing in any jurisdiction.
While he concentrated on “dispute resolution processes” (meaning commercial litigation), the issue of whether criminal cases should also be time limited was left up in the air.
In a recent speech in WA, Chief Justice of the High Court, Robert French (right), called on Australia’s lawyers to design a “parking meter” legal system: there would be a set time determined for the case – once that ran out, the case would end.
Chief Justice French did not spell out the system he has in mind. Instead, he called on lawyers to design the new system. They should ignore their own economic interests, and produce the best possible system regardless of whether it benefited their bottom line.
His comments came during a speech on pro bono (‘for free’) work done by lawyers in and for the community: he praised the annual 1 million or so hours a year of free legal services by Australian lawyers.
But the sting was in the tail of the French speech.
“The answer to the question cui bono? – who benefits (from pro bono work) – is the ‘whole community’. The benefits should not be overstated. The provision of pro bono services is an important aspect of the work of the legal profession. It has considerable symbolic significance,” CJ French said.
“However, its practical significance is limited. It cannot, for example, overcome the systemic problems of cost and delay which continue to bedevil our dispute resolution processes despite the decades’ long efforts of leaders in the profession, courts and court administrators, and governments.
“Everybody here should be aware of the magnitude of that systemic problem and the continuing urgency of the need to do something about it.
“Doing something about it involves asking hard questions uninfluenced by the economic interests of the profession about what is essential to pretrial preparation and the conduct of litigation.
“It may also involve a paradigm shift to treating court time as a finite resource to be allocated to each case according to reasonable requirements, but subject to fixed limits which can be varied only in the most exceptional circumstances.
“The profession’s contribution to responding to these and other systemic problems of the cost and accessibility of legal services is, perhaps, the most important pro bono service that it can offer,” Chief Justice French said.
CJ Robert French AC was speaking on 21 Feb 2014 in Perth at the Law Summer School at the University of WA. His full speech can be found here: http://tinyurl.com/p454wpt
This article was written by Civil Liberties Australia CEO, Bill Rowlings.