Academic urges judges to distil their rulings
Court rulings should be as comprehensible to a barista as to a barrister, according to ex-University of Galway legal academic Tom O'Malley SC, who specialises in criminal law, sentencing, criminal procedure, and constitutional law.
Brevity is a skill
Brevity is a skill not easily mastered and is absent in some rulings from Irish courts, the retired academic states.
O’Malley, whose books include Sentencing Law and Practice, Sentencing: Towards a Coherent Approach, and Sexual Offences, comments that many recent judgments of the Irish superior courts are so long that their impact is diminished.
“Of course, they are all very important. But my essential argument is that their legal and social significance calls for a more concise, economical and fluent style of judgment writing than is currently on display,” he writes
“They are, after all, essentially addressed to the public,” he wrote.
“What makes many judgments intolerably long is the failure of their authors to distil the essence of the facts and the relevant law,” he comments.
“Some might argue that these judgments should be long because they are so important. I would counter that because they are so important they should be much shorter,” he said.
In the US Supreme Court had to decide if an unloaded gun was a "dangerous weapon".
“Justice Stevens, who wrote the court's unanimous opinion, held that an unloaded gun was indeed a dangerous weapon and he explained exactly why – all in five paragraphs, making it one of the shortest opinions in the court's history, but none the less significant for that,” O’Malley said.
A judgment must contain sufficient detail to inform the reader about the background to the case, the relevant law and the reasons for the decision reached, but also be useful, comprehensible and digestible, with a concentration on the central constitutional question at stake, he said.