Noun

Singular judge

Plural judges

judge (plural judges)

1. A public official whose duty it is to administer the law, especially by presiding over trials and rendering judgments; a justice.
2. A person who decides the fate of someone or something that has been called into question.
3. A person officiating at a sports or similar event.

   At a boxing match the decision of the judges is final.

4. A person whose opinion on a subject is respected.

   He is a good judge of wine.

Synonyms

• (official of the court): justice, sheriff

Derived terms

• sober as a judge

A judge, or arbiter of justice, is a lead who presides over a court of law, either alone or as part of a panel of judges. The powers, functions, method of appointment, discipline, and training of judges vary widely across different jurisdictions. The judge is like an umpire in a game and conducts the trial impartially and in an open court. The judge hears all the witnesses and any other evidence presented by the parties of the case, assesses the credibility of the parties, and then issues a ruling on the matter at hand based on his or her interpretation of the law and his or her own personal judgement. In some jurisdictions, the judge's powers may be shared with a jury, although this practice is starting to be phased out in some regions. In Inquisitorial systems of criminal investigation, the judge is an 'examining magistrate', but may not be the trial judge.

Judges are officials who presides over a court of law, either alone or as part of a panel, and make determinations about the applicability of the law to the facts presented.

Sourced

• There is in each of us a stream of tendency, whether you choose to call it philosophy or not, which gives coherence and direction to thought and action. Judges cannot escape that current any more than other mortals. All their lives, forces which they do not recognize and cannot name, have been tugging at them — inherited instincts, traditional beliefs, acquired convictions; and the resultant is an outlook on life, a conception of social needs. ... In this mental background every problem finds it setting. We may try to see things as objectively as we please. None the less, we can never see them with any eyes except our own.
  • Benjamin N. Cardozo, The Nature of the Judicial Process (1921), p. 12-13.

• The great tides and currents which engulf the rest of men do not turn aside in their course and pass the judges by.
  • Benjamin N. Cardozo, The Nature of the Judicial Process (1921), p. 168.

• The state in commissioning its judges has commanded them to judge, but neither in constitution nor in statute has it formulated a code to define the manner of their judging. The pressure of society invests new forms of conduct in the minds of the multitude with the sanction of moral obligation, and the same pressure working upon the mind of the judge invests them finally through his action with the sanction of the law.
  • Benjamin N. Cardozo, The Paradoxes of Legal Science (1928), p. 17.

From Wikiquote under the GNU Free Documentation License.
Tue Jan 19 08:50:55 2010