[quote="Flyingroc Chung":1ovc3cck]A person can get some sort of mental disease, dementia, alzheimer's etc.;[/quote:1ovc3cck]
A judge cen be impeached for insanity.
[quote:1ovc3cck] or a person could possibly just get bored, or depressed. A person may be a good judge now, but RL stresses amy diminish the time and effort he can spend on cases... people change, can't their legal skill change as they do?
Go to any academic institution, you will see tenured professors who used to be good teachers and researchers, but have lost the skill for good research and teaching. Is legal skill so different that it cannot be lost?
In the Philippines, there are judges who because they have security of tenure simply get on by, doing the minimum possible work. My friend who just graduated from law school told me one judge actually told him it was ok to decide a case arbitrarily, and just let the facts get hashed out on appeal.
I fear for the possibility that we might gain a judiciary filled with such people. Training is only a partial answer, what to do with people who have just lost the will to decide cases fairly, yet goes through the motions of hearing them?[/quote:1ovc3cck]
If people become bored or depressed at being judges, then it is quite inconceivable that they would want to stay around and continue to work as judges: it is not as if they will have any significant income from the position in the foreseeable future. Anyone who is bored being a judge will no doubt either resign, or just go away. In the latter case, the judge could be impeached for gross derliction of duty. Your Philappines example is not, therefore, readily applicable to SecondLife.
[quote:1ovc3cck]Besides the ideal of judicial independence, I would like to point out another ideal that is enshrined in our constitution: democratic rotativity. If you entrench people in a government institution, it will likely stagnate and run out of ideas. It may also drift apart from the ideals of the rest of the commnity.
I think it is no surprise that our most successful branch of government is the RA, the same institution that has had the most change in its composition.[/quote:1ovc3cck]
The concept of democratic rotativity is not a concept relevant to a judiciary, since a judiciary is not the sort of institution whose composition is (or ought be) determined democratically in the first place, for all the reasons discussed elsewhere. The function of the judiciary is not, as is the function, for example, of the legislature, to have new ideas or to represent anyone's views: it is to decide cases skilfully and fairly. The suggestion that the judiciary needs not to "drift apart from the ideals of the rest of the community" implies that judges ought decide cases in popular ways - that is wholly inconsistent with judicial independence. The way of ensuring that the judiciary does not subvert democratic legitimacy is by ensuring that the judiciary is subject to the laws passed by a democratic legislature, not that its individual judges hold popular opinions. As to the last statement, there is no basis for contending that the correlation between the RA's success and the frequency of change of its composition entails causality of the same, nor that, even if it did, that that causative mechanism would work equally well on an institution with a vastly different function, the judiciary.