Judge: Encyclopedia II - Judge - Judges in the legal system

Judge - Judges in the legal system

Judges are considered to be the leaders of one of the three branches of government, the judiciary. In most representative democracies with rule of law, judges are required to be impartial and not influenced by outside factors.

In some civil law jurisdictions with inquisitorial systems, judges go to special schools to be trained after graduating with a law degree from a university; after such training they often become investigating magistrate. In common law countries, judges usually operate according to the adversarial system of justice under the applicable rules of civil procedure, and usually are not trained separately from lawyers. In the law of the United States, judges are generally appointed or elected from among practicing attorneys.

In the common law system, when there is a jury trial in the trial courts, the jury generally decides questions of fact (guilt or innocence, whether a party was negligent, what the amount of damages should be, etc.) while the judge decides questions of law (under common-law systems, one of the judge's most important power is jury instructions). In the United States, bench trials and summary judgments are situations in which the judge decides issues of both law and fact.

Historically, in Europe in the Middle Ages, juries often stated the law by consensus or majority and the judge applied it to the facts as he saw them. This practice generally no longer exists.

In Finland, there are two kinds of judges in district courts: a legally-trained judge functions as the president of the court, while judges elected for a four-year term from the population, without any special legal training, serve as lay members of the court. Judges in special courts and apellate courts are always legally trained. Lay judges do not function like a common-law jury. In the usual case, three lay judges in district courts hear criminal cases in cooperation with a legally trained judge, each judge – legally trained or not – having an individual vote. Civil cases, however, are heard exclusively by legally trained judges.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Judges in the legal system", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki