THE BEER PARLOUR JUDGE

By Victor Agusiobo

There is nothing of utility in judges avoiding beer parlours and other social spaces. It does not make them better judges.

As a matter of fact, It makes them awfully ignorant judges.

Society created this withdrawal rule out of fear. We feared that if a judge drinks where litigants drink, he will be compromised. We reasonably felt that familiarity will breed favour and also contempt. It was our quiet prognosis that a handshake in a beer parlour today will become a skewed judgment tomorrow. It may well be. But sometimes life is not just understood in binaries.

So society encouraged judges to withdraw. She encouraged them to live apart and to strive to be pure by being absent.

But in the light of experience and reason, purity by absence is not justice. It is ignorance.

A judge who has never sat in a beer parlour and who has never heard how ordinary people actually live may suffer a discount in certain kinds of knowledge.
He probably has never heard how men agree, how they quarrel, how they borrow and promise and threaten and settle. He has never heard the language of the street. He is totally alien to the slang, the proverbs, the half-finished sentences that mean everything to those who speak them.

And then in the paradox that ensues, that same judge sits in court to interpret that very language.

He reads a witness statement and dismisses it as “unbelievable” — not because it is false, but because he has never experienced that kind of life. He hears a confession and deems it “suspicious,” not because it is coerced, but because he has never been in that kind of pressure. He looks at a street transaction and calls it “improbable” — because his world has no street in it.

The elevated irony here is that the judge is not being impartial. He is probably being blind and calls his blindness integrity.

Impartiality was never meant to mean ignorance of life. It was meant to mean knowledge of life, and the discipline to decide fairly despite knowing it.

THE FICTITIOUS TENANT

Nowhere is this blindness more dangerous than in tenancy cases.

The ecclesiastical judge who loathes public beer drinking may spend an eternity trying to understand his own case.

He is handling a tenancy matter. On paper, there is a tenant. There is a tenancy agreement. There is a rent receipt. There is a defence filed by a lawyer.

On paper, everything is neat. But the street knows what the books do not know: there is no tenant anywhere.

That “tenant” is a fictitious character. He was created by unconscionable lawyers — a name invented to frustrate the landlord, to buy time, to file motions, to delay possession for years. No one has ever lived in that house under that name. No neighbour knows him. No beer parlour has ever seen him. He exists only in the file.

The judge who avoids the street will never know this. He will sit in his chambers, read the papers, adjourn, rule, adjourn again, and wonder why the case never ends.

The judge who knows the street will know it in one evening. Ask two people at the junction: “Who lives in that house?” He will get straight answer. “Nobody by that name, that house has been empty since…”

The books may have taught the learned judge, tenancy law. Only the street can teach him tenancy fraud.

BAILIFFS AT THE DOOR OF THE INNOCENT

But the fictitious tenant is not just invented to delay. He is invented to agree.

The lawyer brings his fake tenant to court to admit to whatever the court directs — to admit to owing rent he never owed, to admit to a consent judgment and other terms of indeterminate consequence. He agrees to everything because he has nothing to lose. He does not live there. Surely, he will lose nothing.

But that judgment does not stay on paper. It bears on the real tenants — the real human beings who actually live in the house, who were never brought to court, who were never served, who never had a chance to speak.

Then one morning, those real tenants wake up to find bailiffs at their door, executing a court decision in a matter they knew nothing about.

They were judged without being heard. They were evicted by a judgment obtained from a man who does not exist.

This is what happens when a judge knows only the books. The books tell him that a party has admitted to some infraction therefore the case is settled. The street would have told him that party is not real, and the real parties are still inside the house, unaware.

A judge who loathes the beer parlour will spend eternity perfecting procedure for ghosts, while real people are thrown out by ghosts.

Only a judge who knows the street will ask the one question that saves justice: “Where is this tenant? Show me the man.”

We do not need judges who are clean because they are isolated. We need judges who are clean because they are strong — strong enough to sit among the people, hear them, know them, and still decide without fear or favour.

Justice that does not know the street cannot serve the street.

Wicked Logic welcomes the debate