The defining role of secular government is to exercise judgment. The court is the central paradigm of government – all government, in all its branches. In Ancient Israel, the simplest model, such as we find in the narratives of David and Solomon and in the Psalms, is that the monarch is a judge who sits in court. “Morning by morning I will destroy all the wicked in the land,” he declares according to the psalm, in what is probably a kind of oath of office; thus, daily assizes are the proof of a just king. Ancient Israel also knew, however, that the task of judgment required not only that the monarch sit in court but that he also found courts.
To provide a court in which a judge sits is no less an act of judgment than to sit in court himself. He considers the situation obtaining, in which those who are wronged lack access to public interest and vindication; he finds it wanting; he redresses it by inaugurating courts. He does not found the judiciary from outside, as it were, like a businessman founding a University chair without himself being a man of learning. The founding of the judiciary is precisely the founding judicial act. It gives judgment in favor of the oppressed.
Oliver O’Donovan Government as Judgment
