The Green Bag
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he had filled the posts of Solicitor and
Attorney General for Ireland in Mr. Gladstone’s government (1872-74). This appointment was therefore a political
appointment.
If you had searched over
gift of eloquent English? If an Eng lishman is judicially eloquent, he has probably acquired his aptitude by years devoted to translating Latin at sight into idiomatic English. It was thus that the first William Pitt taught the
the British Empire, you could not have found a man better fitted than he is for the highest judicial ofiice. He is a man worthy in all respects to have sat, as the third member of an ideal
for the Chief Baron's mastery of Eng lish is that he is an Irishman. It is
court of justice, with Mansfield and
natural for him to express his argument
with Marshall. The most critical would have found it difficult to de cide which of these three men was
in luminous and forcible English.
primus inter pares. Chief Baron Palles is a Catholic, and was a Liberal. He was never a Home Ruler. It is not fitting for a British or
Irish judge to have any politics.
Only
poor lawyers remain politicians on the
bench.
When the Chief Baron mounted
the bench, his politics (sane and sensible as they were for a practising barrister)
dropped ofi him, like the mantle of the prophet. We believe that the well known moderation and reasonableness of the Chief Baron's views had some thing to do with his being selected
for the honorary degree of D.C.L. by the University of Cambridge. Palles, although a Catholic, is a loyal Trinity
second William Pitt how to address the House of Commons.
The explanation
It is one of life's little ironies that the less deserving are so often promoted to the higher place. Mr. Justice Buller
served under Lord Chief Justice Kenyon. It is commonly reported that before Lord Salisbury's government in 1889 rewarded their then Irish Attorney Gen eral by making him the permanent head of the Irish judicial system, they con
sulted the Chief Baron as to whether he objected to the appointment, and, with that forgetfulness of his own merits which some great men possess, the
Chief Baron did not demur. As a con sequence of his modesty, Sir Peter O'Brien became the Lord Chief Justice of Ireland.
Not that the redoubtable “Peter the
Chief Baron has been abolished by
Packer" (a nickname Sir Peter acquired from his alleged skill in “packing" juries, when he was a law officer of the Crown)
statute, he is “the last of the Barons." With one possible exception, he is the
is an ordinary man. Far from it. He is a nephew of the late Mr. Justice
most distinguished judge on the British bench. When at Trinity College, he took the degree equal to that of Senior
assassins of Mr. Burke and Lord Fred en'ck Cavendish with bursts of eloquence
College (Dublin) man.
As the title of
Wrangler at Cambridge. He is par excellence a mathematician, like those
ex-Lord Justices Romer and Stirling (whom we have lost from the English
Court of Appeal), and Lord Justice Fletcher Moulton (whom we happily have still with us, in the Court of Ap peal),all of whom were Senior Wranglers. How has Chief Baron Palles acquired his
O'Brien, who tried the Phoenix Park
that would have been called extraordi
nary in any country but Ireland. Lord O'Brien has no small share of his late uncle’s wit and fire, but his merits are intellectual and personal, rather than
judicial. The Chief Justice and the Chief Baron rarely sit together in the same court, though they are both ex
ofl'icio members of the Irish Court of
