HIGH Court judges are spending a satisfactory amount of time in court, over three hours 53 minutes a day on average, judiciary statistics show.
This is within a hair's breadth of Chief Justice Sir Ti Liang Yang's aim of an average of four hours. Much more than this, and Sir Ti Liang believes it would be too long.
The Registrar of the Supreme Court, Mr Julian Betts, revealed the statistics in response to a survey done by a senior law lecturer at City Polytechnic which found from monitoring the small sample of two different courts daily that judges sit on average three hours 16 minutes.
Mr Betts said the official figures showed an enormous variation between judges. ''But it has to be remembered that judges have different types of work as well as different work habits,'' Mr Betts said.
''Civil judges dealing with interlocutory matters have to spend a lot of time studying papers, whereas in a criminal trial the judge will spend more time in court.'' He was reluctant to release the statistics, saying it would be easy to draw misleading conclusions from them.
''You have got to look at the type of work which the judge was doing and this doesn't appear in the statistics. It is a much more sophisticated exercise rather than taking raw figures and saying that establishes anything,'' Mr Betts said.