With Chief Jus­tice Ivor Archie con­firm­ing that af­ter 17 years in of­fice, this law term will be his last, at­ten­tion has now shift­ed to the ques­tion of suc­ces­sion.

Archie’s de­ci­sion to an­nounce his re­tire­ment a year in ad­vance was in­tend­ed to al­low for an or­der­ly tran­si­tion and sets the stage for one of the most sig­nif­i­cant ju­di­cial ap­point­ments in re­cent years.

Ac­cord­ing to the Con­sti­tu­tion, un­der sec­tion 102, the CJ is ap­point­ed by the Pres­i­dent af­ter con­sul­ta­tion with the Prime Min­is­ter and Leader of the Op­po­si­tion. The fi­nal de­ci­sion, how­ev­er, rests with the Pres­i­dent, in this case Chris­tine Kan­ga­loo.

Con­tact­ed on the is­sue, Dr Shane Mo­hammed said he feels the Pres­i­dent should se­lect some­one who is re­ceived pos­i­tive­ly and not seen as a po­lit­i­cal lack­ey. He said this is im­por­tant, giv­en that the Kan­ga­loo has faced crit­i­cism for be­ing bi­ased to­ward the Peo­ple’s Na­tion­al Move­ment.

“I be­lieve that the per­son who is cho­sen should be of high es­teem, high po­lit­i­cal, high ju­di­cial ilk and le­gal teach­ing by virtue of the con­fi­dence of the ju­di­cia­ry and the le­gal fra­ter­ni­ty in the in­di­vid­ual,” he said.

Mo­hammed be­lieves the can­di­date should come from the Ap­peal Court and said he knows at least five qual­i­fied in­di­vid­u­als who could lead the ju­di­cia­ry.

“Per­sons who’ve served in pub­lic of­fice be­fore, who have had a long ca­reer in the ju­di­cia­ry, whose judg­ments have been fair and have stood the test of the Privy Coun­cil, and I be­lieve, and whose learn­ings and whose acad­e­mia in law is very pres­ti­gious,” he said.

He al­so called for con­sul­ta­tions with le­gal groups like the Crim­i­nal Law As­so­ci­a­tion, the South­ern As­sem­bly of Lawyers and the Law As­so­ci­a­tion.

“I think that way, key stake­hold­ers in the of­fice, to the of­fice of the Chief Jus­tice, as well as in the in­ter­est of a mod­ern ju­di­cia­ry, should be con­sult­ed go­ing for­ward as a part of our prac­tice as a mod­ern so­ci­ety,” he said.

He added, “I be­lieve the Pres­i­dent should choose an in­di­vid­ual who can with­stand pub­lic scruti­ny as well as car­ry the torch of Chief Jus­tice with in­tegri­ty, with temer­i­ty, with ro­bust­ness, with trans­paren­cy and ac­count­abil­i­ty, and with the con­fi­dence of the le­gal fra­ter­ni­ty and the ju­di­cia­ry as a whole,” Mo­hammed shared.

Mo­hammed said there should al­so be strict time­lines by which judg­ments are de­liv­ered and for dis­ci­pli­nary ac­tion against judges who fall short of those time­lines with­out a rea­son­able ex­pla­na­tion. He al­so called for a ju­di­cial ed­u­ca­tion or ju­di­cial col­lege.

Po­lit­i­cal an­a­lyst Win­ford James, mean­while, said the con­di­tions were “not par­tic­u­lar­ly oner­ous” when it came to se­lect­ing a Chief Jus­tice, point­ing to 2008 when Archie was ap­point­ed.

He said when Archie came in­to of­fice, he didn’t have a long his­to­ry of ad­min­is­ter­ing the law.

“He didn’t have the ex­pe­ri­ence of oth­er peo­ple, who, of course, were not hap­py with his ap­point­ment. That is why his ap­point­ment wasn’t il­le­gal, it’s just that for some peo­ple it was in­ju­di­cious,” James ex­plained.

“What we do know is that we want a process by which a Chief Jus­tice is ap­point­ed with­out that ap­point­ment be­ing con­t­a­m­i­nat­ed by the in­volve­ment of per­sons in the pol­i­tics, in the gov­ern­ment of the coun­try,” he said.

He said no mat­ter who Kan­ga­loo se­lects, that per­son will not be un­touched or un­in­flu­enced by the po­lit­i­cal land­scape, as he did not know that there was any­body who was “po­lit­i­cal­ly free” in T&T.

James added that what the pop­u­la­tion want­ed was a process in which a chief jus­tice was ap­point­ed with­out it be­ing po­lit­i­cal­ly con­t­a­m­i­nat­ed.

He al­so high­light­ed the back­log of cas­es and the slow jus­tice sys­tem as mech­a­nisms that did not im­prove un­der Archie and which should be con­sid­ered when se­lect­ing his suc­ces­sor.

Dur­ing Archie’s tenure as the youngest, longest-serv­ing CJ, there were some per­son­al and pro­fes­sion­al con­tro­ver­sies, such as the Mar­cia Ay­ers-Cae­sar fall­out, al­le­ga­tions of as­sist­ing with state hous­ing and con­tracts to a friend, and the Law As­so­ci­a­tion mo­tion in 2018 call­ing for his res­ig­na­tion.

How­ev­er, both po­lit­i­cal ex­perts said there was a lot of work that was done by the Chief Jus­tice over the years, and while some con­tro­ver­sies may have over­shad­owed the strides made and may play a role in who is cho­sen as his suc­ces­sor, these should not neg­a­tive­ly in­flu­ence the mark he is leav­ing be­hind.