The Lord Chief Justice and the Senior President of Tribunals recently made an announcement that sent shockwaves coursing through the legal profession. We were informed that we now have to start addressing District Judges as “Judge” when we are in court.
District Judges (and part-time Deputy District Judges) are the lowest level of judge in the civil, family and criminal courts. They deal with the vast majority of court decisions. In the Family Court, District Judges will deal with applications for financial remedy orders in divorces and domestic abuse injunctions. They also deal with applications about arrangements for children, (although the bulk of such cases nowadays tend to be handled by lay magistrates). District Judges used to deal with divorces, but the task of issuing certificates of entitlement to a divorce is now generally undertaken by Legal Advisers (the modern name for magistrates’ clerks), whose main job is to advise magistrates about the law and procedure when they make decisions.
District Judges still pronounce conditional divorce orders (which, since April 2022 is the new name for a Decree Nisi), although few solicitors ever seen this happen as all such orders are now pronounced in the Family Court at Birmingham, and the court actively discourages people from attending. In over a quarter of a century of practising as a solicitor, I have never seen a District Judge pronounce a Decree Nisi or a conditional order. Even when they were pronounced by District Judges sitting at Colchester County Court, I never went. The practice was for the district judge to put his wig and gown on and to read out a list of names of people whose Decrees Nisi were being pronounced, with the only person present usually being a reporter from the local paper, which used to publish a list of people who were divorcing every week. This was abandoned in Colchester; for the last few years before divorces were taken away from the county court and given to the new single Family Court, all that Colchester County Court did was to pin the list of Decrees Nisi on the noticeboard at the court.
The old Principal Registry of the Family Division in London used to actually hold hearings, which would occasionally lead to silly news stories in the tabloids about a celebrity being granted a “quickie” divorce (there is no such thing as a “quickie” divorce) in a 30 second hearing; these stories usually failed to explain that the celeb’s marriage would not actually end until the Decree Absolute was made at a later date. Bury St Edmunds Regional Divorce Unit also used to hold hearings, although the only person I know of who ever attended was a husband who told me that the court was startled to see him and didn’t know what to do with him. I believe that Birmingham still holds some kind of hearing when the court pronounces the Conditional Order in what I suspect is an otherwise empty court room; litigants in person receive an email from the court which tells then that “The court will pronounce (read out) the conditional order…” This seems a bit pointless.
But I digress.
District Judges have traditionally always been addressed as “Sir” or “Madam”. Informally, outside court or in correspondence, they were addressed as “Judge” but never in court. However, from 1 December 2022, they are to be addressed in court as “Judge”. How quickly this catches on remains to be seen. Those of us who have been used to calling a District Judge “Sir” or “Madam” will no doubt find the habit hard to break. Luckily, nowadays judges are not as stuffy as they once were and are likely to be very forgiving towards solicitors or barristers who forget to call them “Judge”. Once upon a time, judges could often be breath-takingly rude and abrasive to those who were guilty of the slightest breach of protocol; that sort of thing is frowned on these days.
Non-lawyers frequently find this sort of stuff baffling. District Judges will often recount the weird and wonderful way in which they have been addressed by members of the public. “Your Honour” is quite common; the district judge will probably gently point out that that is how you address Circuit Judges (who are the next notch up in the full-time judicial hierarchy) and that “Judge” is sufficient. Some district judges tell stories of even more exotic forms of address. “My Lord” or My Lady” is quite common, but should only be used when addressing a High Court Judge. Apparently “M’lud” is a Dickensian thing and never heard in real life. Anyone who used that expression in the court these days would probably be regarded as absurd, probably the kind of twerp who also insists on quoting legal Latin maxims (“Mr Fotherington, is your client not aware of the maxim “volenti non fit injuria”?” “They speak of nothing else in Barnsley, M’lud). Even more wrong are people who get really confused and call the district judge “Your Excellency”, “Your Worship” or even “Your Majesty”.
“Your Worship”, which sounds like something that you should call a bishop, is in fact sometimes still used to address a lay magistrate. It is very old-fashioned and in my view is to be deplored. “Sir” or “Madam” is perfectly sufficient when addressing magistrates. This excellent article on this subject in The Spectator by Julien Foster says that you should only call them “Your Worship” when the magistrate in question is also the mayor. I never address magistrates as “Your Worship”. Firstly, it is very old-fashioned, and every time I hear it, I recall Han Solo a long time ago in galaxy far far away sarcastically addressing Princess Leia as “Your Worshipfulness” and “Your Highnessness”. Secondly, to be frank, it gives them ideas above their station. (See my blog here about why magistrates should be abolished).
The justification for this change seems to be that saying “Judge” is simpler and more modern. I’m not sure that it is, although to be fair, there has been comment from woman lawyers that they dislike “Madam” as a mode of address; it has a whiff of the bordello about it. Perhaps “Judge” is better. Calling women district judges “Judge” rather than “Madam” does avoid the awful danger that a flustered lawyer might call her “Sir”.
17 December 2022
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