https://m.stacker.news/38674

This question would have been unintelligible before the rise of the modern state, when moral character and expertise were deemed as inextricably linked.[2] Personal virtue was back then the mark of a good jurist and the judicial toga signified moral exemplarity. With the advent of the modern state, professional excellence came to be viewed as detached from personal virtue, professional legal authority become isolated moral authority, and the view that moral character is irrelevant for judicial excellence took root in both legal culture and the culture at large.

There were, indeed, important aspirations driving the modern de-moralization of the professions and, particularly, the judicial office. Democratic aspirations repudiated the idea that moral exemplarity should be the province of a few. A firm opposition to the arbitrariness in the administration of justice of the Ancient Regime led to a replacement of the rule of men by the rule of law. Judges were conceived, as Montesquieu famously put it, as ‘the mouth of the law’: their job was to decide cases by applying the law. In this view, which still prevails today, the judge’s character and value commitments are irrelevant to excellence in the judicial practice. Judges need to know the law and master the legal techniques, but one can be a good judge regardless of one’s subjective qualities of character.

But is that so?

...read more at blogs.cardiff