A former High Court judge who resigned from the bench last September has admitted that it would have been 'better to use a roulette wheel' to decide cases than to expect him to hear cases on tax and insolvency law, which were outside his field of expertise.

Sir Hugh Laddie added that the way people 'bow and scrape' to High Court judges 'brings out the worst' in the judiciary and said that some of his colleagues were 'better at controlling it than others'.


Sir Hugh, who was the first judge to resign from the bench and return to private practice in 30 years, said he had been a patent and trademark barrister for 25 years, but as a judge in the Chancery Division, he had to preside over tax and insolvency cases. He said: 'I knew nothing about tax, except that it came as a nasty shock at the end of the year. I had never studied it or did it at the bar, nor insolvency.


'I had colleagues who said that it was marvellous to do cases outside their own field, that it was stimulating. When I resigned, I said I felt a certain sensitivity about deciding cases about which I had no knowledge. It would have been better to use a roulette wheel.'


Sir Hugh added that the growth of the Internet meant that as a lawyer 'you can now find some absurd judicial pronouncement in support of anything you want'. He said it was 'a well-guarded secret' that before the Internet, 'the most important contributors to the sensible growth of the case law system of jurisprudence were the editors of the law reports'. He said that 'stupid decisions' did not cause a problem then because they were 'left on the floor' by editors.


Sir Hugh, who is now a consultant at intellectual property law firm Willoughby & Partners, made his comments last week at a lecture commemorating 40 years of law at Queen Mary, University of London.