Page:The Irish Constitution Explained.djvu/48

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
46
THE EXPLANATION

therefore the law made by the people at large must be enforced on the individual, and its defiance punished. Unfortunately few people regard their Judicature with the same pride of possession with which they (sometimes) regard the Legislature, and even the Executive. Even when folk; disapprove of their law-makers and their ministers, they disapprove because they conceive they have acted mistakenly on their behalf, whereas they conceive of judges as having acted from a malignancy inborn in them or in the system, with the kind of disapproval reserved for those who are created and are destined to act against their behalf. That is—in most countries, and especially in Ireland—a legacy from evil days, when judges were not the people's judges, but whips sent forth through the land by some person who claimed to be sovereign. With the reversal of sovereignty, however, the judges become the people's judges; the courts are the people's courts, where the laws of their own making are interpreted; the judicial system is the people’s system; and it is for the people to insist that this attitude is observed, not only by them, but by those who interpret the laws and administer justice. For, under the Constitution, no judge sits in any court in the land save by an authority bestowed on him by the people, in the Constitution which they confer on themselves. And it is for the people to remember that fact; for only by that memory will it be recognised in the courts themselves—and, indeed, only thus will it deserve to be recognised there.

It is not, however, necessary that the details of the judicial system should be worked out in the Constitution. It is not, indeed, desirable that they should be (a consideration worthy of attention, not alone here, but in connection with the provisions for the Executive also), for such details belong to later legislation. All that is required in the Constitution is the general outline of the Judiciary, and a statement of its organic relation to the other parts of the powers of government created under it. How that outline will be completed, and the details of the organic relation made good, must be dealt with in a subsequent