Free Law Dissertations - 4, S.3, 5) And Also That ‘the Lord Chancellor Must Have Regard To (a) The
4, S.3, 5) and also that ‘The Lord Chancellor must have regard to (a) the need to defend that independence, (b) the need for the judiciary to have the support necessary to enable them to exercise their functions’ (Ch.4, S.3, 6). The definition of the term ‘judiciary’ (for the purposes of the above Act) is explained in the paragraph 7 that follows. According to that, the ‘judiciary’ as a legal entity is consisted from the judges of any court that is constructed and operates under the rules of United Kingdom (included any international court which exercises jurisdiction) ch. 4, S.3, 7. The rules that are contained in the article 108 of the chapter 4 refer to the power of Lord Chancellor to examine the application of the rules that are connected with the behaviour of the members of the judiciary. In particularly, the Lord Chancellor is being given the right to suspend a person from a judicial office when among other circumstances this suspension appears as necessary in order to maintain confidence in the judiciary (ch. 4, 108, 5c). A basic statute that can be used in logical sequence for the members of the judiciary is the Human Rights Act of 1998, which provides a series of rights that have to be recognized directly by the law as fundamental ones. Towards that direction, the chapter 42, sch. 1 of the Human Rights Act contains the article 10, which states that ‘everyone has the right to freedom of expression’. This freedom includes the right to express a personal opinion without the interference of a person or of an authority (ch. 42, sch. 1, art. 10, par.1).
From the above mentioned legislation, the role and the rights of a judge seem to be fully activated and protected. When coming to the stage of the application of the above rights, however, the power of the conditions which a judge is called to confront, can create a series of implications and lead sometimes to the limitation of these rights in favour of the general interest (as it is formulated by the general or the majority opinion when a claim is submitted at the court). Of course, there are the limits inside of which a judge is free to make use of his right referring to the interpretation of the law provisions, but the existence of occasions of strong oppositions to the legal reasoning and the use of the ‘personal view’ of the judiciary during the decision making process, can limit the legal structure and the content of a specific judgment to the explicit ‘letter of the law’ which can be sometimes proved a disadvantage for a case.
III. Analysis of the term ‘personal view of the judiciary’ according to the law and the scientific research
The content and the extension of application of the term ‘personal view’ are not defined specifically in the law. The provisions that are related with the rights of the judiciary (the category in which ‘personal view’ seems to belong) do not contain a clear definition of the term.
