There is an art in writing judgments. Some judges have it. Others do not. In the latter category, judges have not necessarily been assisted by today’s simple electronic access to the law reports, which permits lengthy chunks of marginally relevant earlier authorities to be incorporated easily into them. The consequence is that it is now commonplace for wordy judgments to run into hundreds of paragraphs.
How times have changed. Without the luxury of being able to draw on cases online, nor to be able to pre-read counsel’s perfectly manicured skeleton arguments, the judgments of the Victorian judges are a model of precision, combining brevity with an ability to get straight to the point. Little wonder, then, that many of the Victorian costs judgments such as London Scottish Benefits Society v Chorley have stood the test of time.
