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Magistrates must commit to sitting for a minimum of 13 days (or 26 half-days) each year.
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There are over 20,000 magistrates in England and Wales, and individuals can be appointed from the age of 18 upwards, retiring at 70. Magistrates or Justices of the Peace (JPs) are not qualified lawyers, but lay volunteers who give up their time to sit in judgment over their peers. Got that? Now it's time for a peep at the secretive world of judges. There tend to be recruitment exercises in cycles of two or three years, so to give you an idea of the number of positions on offer in the judiciary, here's a table of the last three years' worth of recommended appointments:Īppointments recommended by the Judicial Appointments Commissionĭeputy district judges (Magistrates' Court)įigures taken from JAC annual reports or provided directly by the JAC. The minimum post-qualification experience required for certain judicial roles has recently been lowered and the Judicial Office was keen for us to hear about Richard Wright QC, a barrister who was made a deputy district judge in 2006 at the age of 28.īe aware from the outset that gaining a judicial position is an extremely competitive business: the JAC received 5,591 applications in 2013/14 for just over 800 positions (and bear in mind that most of those applications will not have been speculative, but will rather have come from highly qualified candidates). (Indeed, legal academics can become judges too.) Another piece of good news is that the Judicial Appointments Commission (JAC) is working hard to encourage judicial applications from individuals from a wide range of backgrounds.
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It can also help to volunteer, join professional bodies or publish articles. Becoming a judge is about playing the long game, but in the meantime you should be building up your practice as a lawyer, working on advocacy skills and perhaps developing a specialism. “If you said in a pupillage interview 'I hope to be a judge', I suspect most people would think you were getting a little ahead of yourself," says Angus Withington, a Crown Court recorder and member of Henderson Chambers. So to become a judge you must first have practised law – as a solicitor, barrister or legal executive – for a good few years. The Judicial Appointments Commission is working hard to encourage judicial applications from individuals from a wide range of backgrounds. Former Court of Appeal judge Sir Anthony Hooper (now at Matrix Chambers ) set out the basic nature of the English system when we interviewed him in 2012: “The tradition in all common law countries is that judges are chosen from the ranks of legal practitioners.”
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This contrasts with the system in many other countries, especially those with a Roman law system, where you can more or less hit the gavel after a swift graduate programme. Under the English common law system, judges are lawyers who already have quite a bit of work experience under their belt, for example in private practice. But this isn't about glamour it's about the robust application of the law, of course. Imagine the power! Few jobs make a wizened 101-year old look glamorous. Never mind that English judges don't use gavels and that courtroom public galleries are usually emptier than a meeting of the Sepp Blatter fan club – never mind all that: the judiciary is fascinating. The judge bangs a gavel and shouts 'silence in court!' to quell the hubbub erupting from the packed public gallery. 'I didn't do it m'lud!' cries the defendant as he is dragged from the dock down into the cells.