Judges

L.J. Rouse was a freelance writer in Toronto.

Jack Batten, who graduated from the University of Toronto Law School in 1975, has made writing his career, but has maintained his particular, informed insider’s view of the law and its workings. Judges, his fourth book concerned with the legal scene, follows Lawyers, In Court, and Robinette: the Dean of Canadian Lawyers. In ithe examines a difficult, demanding and little-understood role which becomes steadily more difficult: that of the person who is “routinely called upon to exhibit the tact of a diplomat, the wisdom of Solomon, and the patience of a peace negotiator. A judge under our system doesn’t have to be perfect, but he or she had better come awfully close.”

Batten looks at judges and their courtrooms from Provincial Court, which deals with the scourings of the streets, to the Supreme Courts of Canada, in which final judgments and reinterpretations of Canadian law are made. The weight of responsibility upon Supreme Court Judges has been enormously increased in recent years by the arrival of the 1982 Charter of Rights, with all the change and re-examination of previous judgments that that document has entailed.

Crammed with personalities and incident, this is a most readable examination of the law in action as seen from the loftiest, most respected of perspectives, the judge’s bench.