Charlene Smith
The law is being “cheapened” – not only by lawyers who charge extortionate rates, but by a public misled by poor journalistic understanding of legal debates, Judge Mohammed Navsa told a graduation ceremony at the University of the Witwatersrand on Tuesday night.
Navsa, a Johannesburg High Court judge and head of the Legal Aid Board, hammered lawyers for poorly prepared cases and suggested they be disallowed from recovering costs where sloppiness and a lack of application in their client’s defence were apparent.
In a speech titled Serve the Beloved Country, Navsa referred to controversy around two recent judgements: the Nicholas Steyn case and the Allan Boesak case. “The public and the media in some instances do not always appreciate the complexities of legal technicalities and of the sentencing process. Judicial officers who fail to properly carry out their duties deserve censure.”
He called on judges president to ensure that in cases of high public interest the running record of the proceedings be made available. “We should launch an offensive to ensure that the public understands that they own the courts of the land … At the same time we should be careful to appreciate our own fallibility and to fight our own prejudices. If exercising the judicial mind properly leads to an unpopular decision at any particular time, then so be it.”
However, Navsa saved his most stinging attacks for “exorbitant and regularly increasing fees at the top end of the fee scale [from lawyers, which] will inevitably lead to increases further down the line with a greater number of people being excluded from the mainstream of litigation. The anti- lawyer jokes that proliferate reflect a growing public intolerance of those who practise law only for their own advancement.”
He also said that judges were finding “a general decline in the standard of assistance from lawyers appearing before them. Courts should incline toward disallowing such practitioners from recovering costs from their clients when justice demands it.”
Navsa added there needs to be far harder work to ensure access to the law for all – instead of a growing trend where access to the law is becoming too expensive for most.