In the beginning and in the end is the word, at least as far as the life of a judge is concerned. We pronounce. We work with words, and we become amongst the most influential story-tellers of our age. How we tell the story is often as important as what we say. The voice we use cannot be that of a depersonalised and divine oracle that declares solutions to the problems of human life through the emanation of pure and detached wisdom. Nor dare we seek to imitate the artificial sound of a computer that has been programmed to produce inexorable outcomes. We speak with the living voices of real protagonists who are immersed in and affected by the very processes we deal with. If law is a machine we are the ghosts that inhabit it and give it life.
