Bruce McKain meets a modern judge who wants to see our legal system
stripped of the frills and delays which try the patience of witnesses,
juries and public
IF our judges are not careful they are in serious danger of losing
their membership of the Will Carling Club, which is reserved for boring,
out-of-touch old fuddy-duddies.
These days most of them are not really that old, and some are
expressing in public radical opinions that a few years ago they would
have kept to themselves, assuming such thoughts crossed their minds at
all.
Lord McCluskey, of course, has never been slow to publicise his
sometimes controversial views in speeches and newspaper articles, and
the untimely death of Lord Morton robbed the Bench of another judge who
spoke out fearlessly when he thought the system was failing the public.
He frequently criticised the way witnesses and jurors were mucked
about to suit the convenience of lawyers and condemned procedure in the
Court of Session as cumbersome, expensive and out of date.
That is a view shared by a number of current Scottish judges, and
articulated most recently by Lord Gill, who created something of a stir
by describing our civil justice system as a contemporary relic of a
vanished age and calling for a wide-ranging review with the public
interest as the paramount consideration.
It was a bold speech, delivered to solicitors at Gleneagles, because
at the time Brian Gill was the new boy on the Bench and might have been
excused for dipping his toe gently in the water rather than plunging in
head first.
But he does not fit the general public image of the judiciary of
Edinburgh New Town establishment.
He was brought up in Riddrie, in Glasgow, and his father, Tommy, an
insurance agent, was a professional saxophone player before the war. His
musical skill helped to fund his son's education at St Aloysius' College
and Glasgow University and the talent rubbed off to such an extent that
Brian Gill plays the organ to professional standard.
He and his wife Kate have brought up five sons and a daughter, aged
between 25 and 11, making it difficult to accuse him of being out of
touch with the attitudes and problems of the younger generation.
Instead of following the normal route of an apprenticeship with a firm
of solicitors, Brian Gill accepted a lectureship at Edinburgh University
and taught jurisprudence from 1964. However, he really hankered after a
career at the Bar and he put that ambition into effect three years
later.
He carved out a lucrative niche for himself by becoming a specialist
in agricultural law, a subject in which few of his colleagues were
interested at the time, and in 1982 published The Law of Agricultural
Holdings in Scotland, the lawyers' bible on the subject.
In 1979, he accepted the invitation to become a prosecutor in the
Crown Office, an experience which taught him how to present cases simply
and directly with the absolute minimum of embellishment.
He appeared for the next of kin at the Lockerbie inquiry which
effectively breached Pan Am's defences and rendered its position
hopeless in subsequent court cases in the USA.
Robert Black, professor of Scots law at Edinburgh University, devilled
to Brian Gill and remembers him as a devastating cross-examiner. ''He
didn't shout or bawl or lose his temper. He would destroy a witness with
a rapier thrust.''
Another former colleague at the Bar said: ''He's not concerned with
the pomp of the law. He wants things done as quickly and efficiently as
possible.''
The Liberal Democrat MP, Menzies Campbell QC, has been a close friend
of Brian Gill's since they arrived at the ordinary Greek class together
at Glasgow University in 1959.
He talks of his former classmate's ''high-octane mind'' and his
capacity for hard work. ''He's a man of great religious faith and a
rigorous intellect.''
As one of the Scottish Bar's most prolific earners, it cannot be
assumed that Brian Gill, now 53, would have jumped at the chance to
become a senator of the College Justice. The salary of about #100,000 a
year represents a huge drop.
But there were counterbalancing attractions. As one lawyer put it:
''The Bench does represent the logical culmination of a successful
career at the Bar, from arguing the law to actually declaring it.''
Judging from his Gleneagles speech, Lord Gill certainly does not see
his role as a passive arbiter at the mercy of the system.
''The impatience of the public is there to see. It is to be seen in
the frustrated client who asks the question ''When?'' It is to be seen
in the expert whose own search for the truth has become distorted by
forensic tactics; it is to be seen in the frustrated witness who spends
a day or more in an inhospitable waiting room only to be sent away.''
''If you were to sit down and start to work out a system today, it
would be nothing like the one we've got.''
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