In New Zealand ~ Judges go under microscope

By JENNI MCMANUS - The Independent

Last updated 08:57 21/05/2009

Several of the country’s top judges have been described as idiosyncratic, arrogant, inflexible and not up to the job intellectually.

Nor can many run a courtroom efficiently or write timely and coherent judgments. Many lack litigation experience, meaning they come to the Bench with little idea about how to conduct a trial.

Most seriously, at least two are accused of predetermining a case before hearing the evidence.

The criticism comes in Judging the Judges, a survey published in today’s issue of The Independent where a group of our top barristers has been asked to rate our higher court judges.

All spoke on condition of anonymity. All had previously been offered positions on the Bench – and turned them down.

Separately, they were each asked to rank every judge in the High Court, Court of Appeal and Supreme Court.

They were also asked what qualities they expected from their judges.

As a basic, the barristers want judges to have good analytical and interpretation skills (Court of Appeal), adjudication ability (High Court), stand-and-deliver (litigation) experience, scholarship, intelligence, the ability to engage in dialogue, and to be compassionate and fair.

Underlying the survey is the issue of power. Judges are empowered to stand in judgment of us all. But who judges the judges?

Nobody, it seems

Short of impeachment, they’re hard to shift once appointed to their $360,000-a-year (plus) jobs. And there’s little in the way of accountability and quality control.

Recently-retired High Court judge John Hansen calculates each High Court judge, with support staff, costs taxpayers more than $630,000 a year, plus superannuation.

With this sort of money, the public is entitled to expect fast, inexpensive, fair and just resolution of criminal and civil matters, Hansen says.

Are we getting it?

A big percentage of our top barristers say no.

The Independent did a similar survey in 1994, to the fury of then Chief Justice Sir Thomas Eichelbaum and members of the conservative legal Establishment.

As they saw it, Judging the Judges was vulgar, abusive and brought the judicial system into disrepute. It was “unprecedented in New Zealand for lawyers to speak out critically in public of judges in this way”, Sir Thomas said at the time.

The Independent’s view: respect for the judiciary and courts as institutions might be essential but respect for the individuals occupying these positions must be earned if it is to be worthy of the name. Most of the information is common knowledge among the barristers who appear daily before these judges.

The Independent’s sin, it appears, was making it public.

But this type of information is highly relevant to business readers paying legal bills who want to know as much as possible about a judge’s style and capabilities, and how he/she might react to different circumstances and different types of argument.

Lawyers, or those who want to win, tailor their arguments to suit a particular judge’s particular style.

It is also relevant to suggestions by Justice Minister Simon Power that the already considerable power of judges could be boosted by moves to scrap jury trials for offences carrying less than three years’ jail.

A spokesman for Power said yesterday the minister “wasn’t interested” in commenting on the survey.

Child abuse continues in different guises

The current Family Law (FLAW) regime in Canada will be looked back upon in the same manner as the current Irish examination of the residential schools (orphanage) scandal now occurring. Citizens will ponder "how did we let this go on under our noses." John Waters is a brave journalist for comparing the treatment of parents in 2009 to this former era, What applies in Ireland also applies to Canada. Judges, lawyers and their parasitic acolytes have been involved in one of the most damaging to children social experiments in history.MJM

Fri, May 22, 2009

OPINION: RESERVING TO itself vast resources of power, the State tends towards evil. It cannot really be “good”, and even with eternal watchfulness and openness does well to avoid outright corruption, writes JOHN WATERS

The Ryan report describes a wholesale State-driven system of child abuse. The Catholic Church was up to its dog-collar in it, but with the collusion of the Department of Education, An Garda Síochána and the courts. State-run systems operate on a reflex impulse of denial, at the heart of which is a knot of ideological rationalisation called upon by each component to justify its own role. In the case of the horrors set forth in the Ryan report, the dominant ideological proposition was that troublesome children were a threat to public order, so any means were justifiable in their subjugation. Such children were beyond the human embrace.

Once the State closes ranks around any breaking of the law, the illegality creates a new dispensation, a new constitution that nullifies the old. The wider society knew that decency had been abandoned, but the corruption of State power unleashed a deadly concoction of fear, contrived scepticism, powerlessness and impatience with anyone insisting that something evil was happening. It takes great courage to challenge people with powers to snatch children and incarcerate them in state gulags, and so the popular perspective on these by-no-means-secret obscenities was expressed in lame and guilty jokes.

Some people talk about “the culture of the time”, as though there must have existed some radically less civilised understanding than is available now. But it is not necessary to contort our imagination in an attempt to comprehend the light and shade of an earlier era. There never has been a “culture” when it was possible for a whole society to forget that abusing children is evil.

The past is not over. Similar things happen today, but in different guises, and it will again take a generation before society acquires the distance necessary to acknowledge the wrongs being done now.

This week, I received an e-mail from a man whose children have been taken into care in circumstances defying comprehension or justification. In a system said to allow only for light-touch intervention, the HSE has found a way to trample all over the rights of this man and his children on a pretext that, widely replicated, would result in every child in the country being taken into care.

This case indicates that individual elements within the system can acquire extraordinary powers by virtue of the unwillingness of other elements – judges, for example – to insist that the letter of the Constitution and the law be applied. The vindictive whim of a social worker is sufficient to unleash the most draconian response.

This father has not seen his children for almost three months because they have been moved to new schools and foster homes and the HSE has summarily and illegally terminated his minimal access and refused even to give him his children’s addresses. Why? Because he dared to speculatively telephone a foster mother in an attempt to discover his children’s whereabouts. Unbelievable? So, in the same sense, is the stuff of the Ryan report.

This man, I beg you to believe, is guilty of nothing except that, struggling to cope in extraordinary circumstances, he was naive enough to ask the HSE for help. If the citizens of Ireland were to read a full account of his story, there would be a national outcry. However, I cannot tell you much about it because the rules of secrecy which supposedly exist for the protection of families are being used to conceal forms of brutalisation that would not read out of place in the Ryan report.

Ostensibly, there are legal remedies for such matters, but in practice wherever this man goes he encounters a solid wall of implacability and denial. His lawyers seem utterly helpless. This week, there was a chink of light when a new senior counsel was persuaded to meet him to discuss the possibility of a judicial review. The father went to the meeting in a spirit of hopefulness, but came away in even deeper despair.

The barrister made little of the issue, barely looking at the father and speaking with his eyes closed. It was clear he had not read the brief. He told this distraught father that he should be glad that he was giving him time free of charge because normally people have to pay a lot of money for this privilege. He told him, too, that his only route was to return to the District Court – where he has already spent €30,000 in failed attempts to penetrate the closed system – and apply to have his access restored. In other words, he should get on his knees and beg the State to allow him to spend perhaps an hour a month in the company of his children.

When the father pointed out that the HSE had broken the law, the barrister shrugged and said that no High Court judge would be interested. The father later discovered that this barrister gets a lot of business from the HSE.

Welcome to the “culture of our time”.

© 2009 The Irish Times

In OZ ~ Shared parenting laws having an impact.

Don Leemburggen, Friday, May 22nd, 2009

Research conducted by the Child Support Agency shows increased co-operation between parents.

In February 2008, 34% of receiving parents and 40% of paying parents considered their relationship with the other parent “co-operative”. Research undertaken in August 2008 has seen this increase to 49% of receiving parents and 51% of paying parents.

I suspect that the shared parenting laws are having an impact.

Don Leemburggen is the resident Family Law specialist at Barry Nilsson Lawyers

Fathers 4 Justice pair face trial

1 hour ago

Two Fathers 4 Justice supporters have been ordered to stand trial in June accused of "endangering" a passenger jet during a protest at Heathrow Airport.

Raymond Ferguson, 54, of High Street, Stanwell, Staines, Middlesex, and Hugh Boyle, 43, of the same address, were arrested on March 18 this year after cutting through the perimeter fence shortly before a Boeing 767 took off from the southern runway for the Caribbean island of Grand Cayman.

At London's Isleworth Crown Court, the pair admitted one count of criminal damage but denied "acting in a manner likely to endanger" the aircraft and Ferguson was remanded in custody while his co-defendant was allowed bail on condition he did not go near the airport.

Copyright © 2009 The Press Association. All rights reserved.

Female doctors hurt productivity: report

My comments left on the National Post Site:

Mike Murphy, Thursday, May 21, 2009

This pattern is not new but may have just been discovered in medicine. Feminists like to promulgate the myth of women making 71 cents on the dollar as compared to men. The reasons why this is so are also evident in this study. Women have different work patterns, take more time from work for a variety of reasons including child birth, they work fewer hours on their jobs, they commute shorter distances.

The Victim Feminist spin will be the female Doctors earn less money than men. Now that we have that out of our system we learn to deal with it. We need more Doctors enrolled in med school whether they be men or women. Life goes on. If the victim feminists start to spin this as further victimization of women - mow them down with facts. This isn't about the patriarchy suppressing females it is about personal choices....and this on the MacLean's Magazine site.

When you give a monopoly to any group or organization they have not got the right stimulation (in the private sector competition) to redress what customers are telling them. If the RCOPS is behind the shortage and not government policy they need to be removed from any form of recruitment in med schools.

The study proves that females have different work habits, work fewer hours, take more time off for family reasons. There is nothing wrong with this and it is their choice. Those of us men who have been stay-at-homes for periods to raise children understand it completely. More men are doing the same thing and much more involved in the nurturing and rearing of children.

This pattern, as found in this study, is not new but may have just been discovered in medicine. Feminists like to promulgate the myth of women making 71 cents on the dollar as compared to men. The reasons why this is so are also evident in this study. They make less money because of the factors shown in this study and it is by choice not the patriarchy as victim feminists like Antonia Zerbisias, over at the Toronto Red Star, like to spin.

The Victim Feminist talking points will be the female Doctors earn less money than men and it will be true!. But it will be for reasons of choice as it is most every where else not because of that nebulous and evil patriarchy. Now that we have that out of our system we learn to deal with it. We need more Doctors enrolled in med school whether they be men or women. Life goes on. If the victim feminists start to spin this as further victimization of women – mow them down with facts.

If restricting entries into med school is artificial then it needs to be changed by the government regulators and the money found to support it. Tax and spend McQuinty can juggle his allotments and find it easily instead of buying our votes with our own tax dollars.MJM

Published: Tuesday, May 19, 2009

The growing ranks of female physicians in Canada will slash medical productivity by the equivalent of at least 1,600 doctors within a decade, concludes a provocative new analysis of data indicating that female MDs work fewer hours on average than their male colleagues.

The paper comes just a year after a blue-chip list of medical educators publicly condemned what they called the scapegoating of women for Canada's severe doctor shortage.

Dr. Mark Baerlocher, the study's lead author, acknowledged he is tackling a thorny issue, but stressed he does not favour curbing the number of female physicians. Instead, the study calls for greater increases in medical-school enrolment to offset the phenomenon.

"It's not meant to be a negative paper in any way," he said in an interview. "It's meant to take an objective, hard look at the work-hour differences that most people would agree are very real.... You can't simply ignore it because it's a sensitive issue."

The researchers led by Dr. Baerlocher analyzed results from the 2007 National Physician Survey, a canvass of doctors sponsored by major medical associations.

The survey found that women, on average, provided 30 hours a week of direct patient care, compared to 35 from men, a result of female doctors - still burdened disproportionately with child rearing and other domestic tasks - doing less on-call work and being more likely to take leaves.

Those figures were then factored in with population numbers to calculate doctor productivity per capita.

In 2007, women made up 32% of doctors. But with female students accounting for about 60% of medical school classes now, the numbers are expected to even up within a decade. When the male-female balance reaches 50-50, overall productivity will have decreased by the equivalent of 1,588 male doctors or 1,853 female doctors, all else being equal, the study concluded.

The decreased productivity would be felt sooner in specialties already becoming female-dominated, such as pediatrics and obstetrics and gynecology, the researchers say.

The long surgical wait times and lack of family physicians that plague the Canadian health care system are largely blamed on the paucity of doctors. Their ranks - now at 67,000 - would need to jump by another 20,000 to reach the average for Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries.

Much of the problem is blamed on a decision by provincial governments in the early 1990s to slash medical-school enrolment, just as the ageing Baby Boom generation was producing more illness. In recent years, enrolment has been increased somewhat again.

Dr. Robert Ouellette, president of the Canadian Medical Association, said medical schools need to train even more doctors than they do now, but he steered clear of suggesting the lifestyles of female doctors are making the shortage more acute. The new generation of physicians - both male and female - tends to work fewer hours generally than older colleagues, he said. And there is evidence that women spend more time with patients, are better communicators and offer more preventive medicine.

"It's not only the hours that count - it's the quality of care that's important also," Dr. Ouellette said.

After a spate of media coverage of male and female doctors' different work patterns, the deans of medicine and other senior administrators at the universities of Toronto and Western Ontario wrote an editorial in the Canadian Medical Association Journal last year that urged "ending the sexist blame game."

"To disparage in any way the intelligent, dedicated women ... who have chosen to devote their lives to medicine is shameful," they wrote.

Dr. Baerlocher, a radiology resident at the University of Toronto, said he agrees women should not be blamed, but lamented a general reluctance in the medical profession to examine controversial issues, such as gender differences and abortion.

"There are a lot of topics that aren't adequately studied, because it's deemed a socially sensitive topic."

National Post

tblackwell@nationalpost.com

BBC ~ Domestic violence ~ A frequently-cited statistic says domestic violence is the leading cause of death or injury for women aged 15-44.

Domestic violence

More or Less Friday, 15 May 2009 BBC Radio 4, 1330 BST Have your say

A frequently-cited statistic says domestic violence is the leading cause of death or injury for women aged 15-44.

It has been widely reported and appears in government reports.

We explain why it is completely wrong.

And we ask how we can get better data on domestic violence.

Tim Harford takes apart a rogue statistic on domestic violence which has been circulating since the 1990s, questions news reports which suggest that the recession is hitting white collar workers hardest and reveals a new mathematical riddle - the Kate Bush conjecture.

An Open University co production for BBC Radio 4.

Broadcast on:

BBC Radio 4, 8:00pm Sunday 17th May 2009

Duration:

30 minutes

Available until:

12:00am Thursday 1st January 2099