Coming off the Bench

His overall assessment was very much to the point: “our traditional concept of adjudication and the assumptions on which it is based provide an increasingly unhelpful, indeed misleading framework for assessing either the workability 2 or the legitimacy of the role of the judge and the court within this model.”. [...] In the context of the adversarial process, methods that enhance the affected parties’ ability to participate in the decision-making strengthen the overall exercise, while efforts to compromise the parties’ 25 participation serve to impair the decision-making endeavour. [...] Legitimacy in the decisions and the legal institutions generating the decisions is bolstered by the parties’ ability to engage and be heard in the process. [...] Thus, the adversarial process incorporates a procedural system “in which the parties not the judge have primary responsibility for 26 defining the issues in dispute and for carrying the dispute forward through the system.” Closely associated with these principles is the understanding that the particular processes developed within an adversarial system are organized around the presentation and test [...] Self-Represented Litigants’ and the Judiciary In appraising the continued workability and legitimacy of the adversarial process, given the growth of self-representation, it is important to take account of the self- represented litigants’ perspective on their experiences engaging in the civil justice 45 system.