‘Traditionally judges have kept their mouths shut and not entered the arena of the administration of justice or policy matters,’ noted Mr Justice Coleridge in his candid, compelling and at times caustic speech to the Association of Lawyers for Children.

That consensus is breaking down, clearly, as the strains on the justice system become ever more severe and the government prepares to implement swingeing budget cuts whose implications ‘cannot possibly have been properly considered’ (as Coleridge himself puts it).

In this respect the high court judge was echoing the president of the family division, Sir Nicholas Wall, who has stressed that the ‘instinctive judicial reluctance’ to go public over matters within [judges’] sphere of activity ‘must come to an end’.

Coleridge praised Wall’s speech as ‘brave and hard-hitting’, epithets which also apply to his own address.

The legal profession will need to build as broad a coalition as possible if it is going to challenge reforms which appear to have been designed without any thought to unintended consequences. Constitutionalists become uncomfortable, and politicians angry and frustrated, when judges encroach upon the political arena, however tangentially. But with so much at stake, the judiciary surely has a duty to do so where (to quote Wall again) the ‘exercise of its proper functions is impeded’.