This is a podcast from the archives of the BBC Reith Lectures.

This lecture in the series Law, Justice and Democracy, given by John McCluskey, was originally broadcast in 1986.

In the first lecture, I undertook to look at the role of our judges and at the character of our judiciary.

I did so because we need to understand these matters

in order to make a reliable judgment about whether or not

we should confer upon judges a more active, a more interventionist role.

Should we augment their power to make and unmake law?

Should we empower them to review and even overrule laws made by Parliament.

So I asked what judges do, and reminded you that they decide the cases that happen to come before them.

Of course, they don't sit under a palm tree deciding each case as the fancy takes them or even as their subjective

sense of justice suggests. They decide according to law. Law and justice are not the same thing.

Justice is an abstract ideal whose precise content in any particular dispute is uncertain and

debatable.

By contrast, law is a kind of system, a collection of principles, makeshifts, fictions and expedients, none of them unchangeable and most varying in character depending on the time and the place.

So, at the simplest level, law is a tool designed to enable men to sculpt justice out of the raw material of life.

But it would be naive to rest content with that description.

Law is a social instrument. It embodies and enforces moral, social, political, cultural and economic choices.

It translates these choices into rules which are intended to realize both ultimate and

intermediate social goals. It compromises these choices when they come into conflict.

Often the choice is difficult and painful. A judge

may find himself restricted to choosing which is the lesser of two evils. So the links between

justice and law are sometimes tenuous and indistinct. In a society like the United States of America,

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