The Judicial Oath

Declaring and affirming to do right by all manner of people

In September, I went to judge school.

I was appointed this year to sit as a judge in Cambridge and, before I can start properly, I have to do a series of observations as well as a week-long training course. Part of the latter involved being "sworn in" by taking both the "oath of allegiance" - the same, I think, as the one MPs take when they’re elected - and then the judicial oath.

Before taking them, I had never read them, nor given them much thought. They are, I think, quite beautiful, especially the judicial oath, which was lent a special sort of majesty by coming slightly unwarned of at the end of a tiring week.

My cohort of judges swore them aloud to each other and before our Senior Judge, the President of Employment Tribunals. For reasons alphabetical, I went first. I felt I had to give it some welly: Brian Blessed-y.

Now the text.

“I, ____________ , do solemnly sincerely and truly declare and affirm that I will well and truly serve our Sovereign King Charles the Third in the office of ____________ , and I will do right to all manner of people after the laws and usages of this Realm without fear or favour, affection or ill will.”

Perhaps it's the gentle archaism of it, and the nobility of swearing to "do right to all manner of people", proof that it’s an idea more ancient than any modern discrimination legislation.

We know that in classical Athens, a “dikast” (a citizen juror who decided lawsuits) swore an oath to decide cases “to the best of his judgement” (“γνώμῃ τῇ ἀρίστῃ”, which could also be translated as “to the best of his knowledge”). Aristotle says that that does not “justify him in deciding contrary to the law, but is only intended to relieve him from the charge of perjury, if he is ignorant of the meaning of the law”. Fair warning.

I wonder if there’s a Greek flair to the formulation at the end of our modern oath: "fear or favour, affection or ill will", a double couplet of antonyms but which swaps the order of positive/negative ideas so as to connect around favour and affection. I think it must be a “chiasmus”, a rhetorical device in which two or more clauses are balanced against each other by the reversal of their structures to produce an artistic effect. It makes me think of the line in Byron’s Don Juan which says that “pleasure’s a sin, but sometimes sin’s a pleasure” but that is more playful, more witty than the language in the oath. Maybe it’s more akin to the lines in Othello

“But O, what damned minutes tells he o'er

Who dotes, yet doubts; suspects, yet strongly loves.”

Really, the two couplets are tautologous (doubting and suspecting, doting and loving), but give poetic force to the point being made by, not only the alliteration (which is almost present in the oath too), but by requiring the competing concepts to trade places, giving them equal weight. Most judicious.

I also quite liked getting to refer to “this Realm” as if treading Shakespearean boards.

An added highlight to the ceremony was that one of my new colleagues, a native speaker, took her oath in Welsh: really, really beautiful. To his great credit, the President did his bit in Welsh too.

As another of my colleagues reflect afterwards - having wiped away a tear or two - the beauty of the oath may be no more or less than that it sets out how we would hope to behave in any sphere of our lives.

I will aim to be equal to it