Dissent around the world

Four senior Supreme Court judges Friday listed the problems that they said are affecting the country’s highest court.
Dissent around the world

Four senior Supreme Court judges Friday listed the problems that they said are affecting the country’s highest court. How have dissenting judges been treated in other countries?

A Lady stands out

In 2010, a UK Supreme Court judge differed with the opinion of eight other male justices in the “prenuptial agreement case,” writes Matthew Ryder, a barrister at Matrix Chambers in London in the Guardian. Lady Hale’s comments had an impact. “In short, there is a gender dimension to the issue. It is for that reason I have chosen to write a separate judgment,” she said

Ryder writes that traditionally, dissenting judgments were not favoured in England’s highest courts. If senior judges had a difference of opinions, they had to keep it private. At the most, they could write them in a “special book that no one ever saw”. But over the last century, the dissenter has been heard

The ‘Great Dissenter’

In the US, they have always honoured the dissenting voice. Oliver Wendell Holmes, who was a US Supreme Court judge during the early 20th century, did not agree with the majority so often that he became known as the “Great Dissenter”. He supported freedom of speech for people speaking against the US government in the case of Abrams v US 250 US 616 (1919)

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