How Judges Make Decisions?

Law students enrolled in various law schools learn little about the fundamentals of legal jurisprudence as being an elective course. Not only that, professors spend less time on this subject matter and more on the exigencies of law. Among these students become Judges and must decide on cases that range from a simple case to a highly complex legal matter. The fundamentals of jurisprudence being taught is different in various parts of the world. For instance, the teachings of law within the American legal education is different from the common law principles taught in European and Asian countries.

Following predefined learning processes, Attorneys adhere to the notion that traditional law books and materials seldom suffice in determining the outcome of the case. While books and materials provide solid understanding of legal principles, reasoning, and logic, there is a dire need of having greater understanding of how the court interprets and gives its verdict. In most cases, students are taught that the outcome of a case can either be rules in favor of the plaintiff or the defendant. As a result, comparing precedents and various historical cases and patters, students fall victim to various forms of biases.

The Legal Realism entails that typical style of judicial decisions are not quite accurate depiction of the actual process of adjudication by basing itself on the major premise of law itself, followed by facts as its minor premise, and its conclusion follows the logical certainty. This is also known as mechanical jurisprudence.

No matter how the case is decided in the court of law, legal reasons, as implicitly taught within the American legal education, solely by themselves cannot form the basis of why a Judge decided a case as he or she did! On the contrary, the rest of the world, for the most part, follows the norm of:

How often an existing law runs out
How to fulfill existing gaps within legal reasoning and logic
Some Judges deciding on matters of fact follow a certain pattern such as enforcement of norms of prevalent culture and reaching the best possible decision under the prevalent socioeconomic condition. The main role of Judges should to act as a delegated decision maker and to dig deeper into various Cases, Statutes, Principles, and Jurisprudence.

Unlike classic legal thought, the legal education, largely shaped by the legal Realists in understanding the nature of adjudicating matters, has a distinct way of looking at the law. Judges take on these approaches while deciding cases, and reach to conclusions that may turn out to be good for some people, but bad for others.

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Syed Raza:

With over 20 years of combined experience in the fields Law, Management, and IT, Syed has impeccable reviewing and strong editing skills with a long track record of writing technical, legal, and management articles that make readers stop and think. Being an entrepreneur, professor, and attorney, he provides consultancy, management consulting, and project management in e-Discovery issues in complex civil litigation.