Foreword
| Pages | 3-6 |
| Date | 01 April 2025 |
| Published date | 01 April 2025 |
| Author | Wednesday Eden |
III
Foreword
This year marks the tenth anniversary of the Cambridge Law Review, which was founded in
2015 by then Editors-in-Chief Ruth McGuinness and Peter Bruland with the goal of providing
a contemporary forum for legal scholarship at a time when there we re relatively few student-
run law journals in the UK. Since then, the journal has remained steadfast to this goal and has
consistently provided a forum for students, practitioners, and established academics alike
whose articles on diverse and pressing legal issues have been of immense interest to both UK
and international readers.
Against this rich history, I am therefore honoured to present the Spring Issue of Vol-
ume 10 of the Cambridge Law Review, which includes six articles that each offer stimulating
and novel insights on certain challenging legal topics. These articles have been selected for
publication because we believe that they represent valuable additions to the academic litera-
ture and will likely stimulate further scholarly debate. For this Volume, Serle Court Chambers,
a pre-eminent commercial chancery barristers’ chambers, are sponsoring a £500 prize for the
best submission across both Issues 1 and 2 on a topic in English commercial law and/or equity.
The winner will be announced in the foreword of the Autumn Issue.
In preparing this Issue, I am indebted to our student editors (both at the University
of Cambridge and through our International Editor programme) who spent several months
reviewing the submissions we received and recommending articles for publication. I am also
immensely grateful to the members of the Managing Board (Christopher Symes, Samuel Soh,
and Jonathan Rutherford) for their expert guidance on specific areas of law. This Issue would
not have been possible without their dedicated involvement throughout the review process.
Lastly, I would like to thank the authors for their excellent contributions to this Issue and for
their attentiveness during the editing stages.
Issue 1 begins with Professor Talia Fis her’s article, ‘Within the Sound of Silence:
Reassessing the Role of Reasoning in Judicial Decision- Making’, which challenges the seem-
ingly ingrained assumption within Anglo-American legal systems that it is ‘inherently and uni-
versally desirable’ for judges to give reasons for their decisions. Fisher notes that the US
Supreme Court’s frequent use of its ‘shadow docket’, where a number of its decisions are
made without outlining the judges’ reasoning, has recently been criticised by commentators
who regard this as ‘circumvent[ing] an essential aspect of the act of judging’. In contrast to
these commentators, Fisher presents a more nuanced account of judicial reason-giving, by
critically examining five arguments that are typically used to justify judges’ provision of reasons.
These arguments are the following: first, that judicial reason-giving increases the ‘quality’ of
judicial decision-making by enhancing its transparency and accountability; secondly, that it
fosters the development of legal precedent; thirdly, that it fulfils the ‘expressive functions’ of
the law, such as by communicating collective norms; fourthly, that it legitimises judicial au-
thority by, inter alia, ensuring that judicial decisions can be understood, and thus ‘authored’,
by the public; and fifthly, that it enables individuals to participate actively in the legal process
and upholds their due process rights, s uch as the right to be heard. Taking each of these
arguments in turn, Fisher exposes their fundamental limitations and identifies certain circum-
stances in which it is arguably preferable for judges
not
to give reasons for their decisions.
These limitations include, inter alia, her observation with respect to the first argument that
requiring judges to provide reasons might undermine the quality of their decisions owing to
‘verbal overshadowing’ (where judges might privilege reasons that are easier to articulate, but
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