Social media and truth decay: Chief Justice on the battle to preserve public trust in Singapore’s courts

Under the Constitution, the standard retirement age for Supreme Court judges, including the Chief Justice, is 65, though there are provisions for extensions.

On the matter of truth decay, Chief Justice Menon traced the phenomenon of how the loss of common space over time has created problems for society.

He cited an interview by former US Senator Ben Sasse to the New York Times on how the boom in the number of US news outlets led to a fragmentation of audiences as echo chambers grew.

This, he believes, is a significant contribution to the breakdown of truth in the US because people no longer believe that there is such a thing as objective truth, he said.

If citizens lose their faith in courts as objective truth-seeking institutions, the consequences go beyond Internet trolling.

“If you have a situation where most people believe, rightly or wrongly, they believe that the courts are making their decisions in some other way than trying to discern the truth from the evidence, you have a huge breakdown, a breakdown of confidence in the courts, breakdown of order in society,” he said.

This is part of why the judiciary makes sure it gives reasons for its judgments and decisions and attempts to make sure they are explained and accessible, he said.

It does so through providing case summaries for court judgments, with the goal to make sure that summaries are comprehensible to a layperson.

“I always make the point that you write judgments for a range of audiences, and it’s not the case that you’re writing judgments only to make law and only to speak to lawyers,” said Chief Justice Menon. 

“You’re also writing judgments to speak to the parties, and more importantly, in a sense, you’re writing judgments to speak to your country.”

A MORE USER-CENTRIC JUDICIARY

He then said the courts have set up an Access to Justice division with the aim to make the judiciary more “user-centric”.

Chief Justice Menon said that when most people think of access to justice, they think only of pro-bono work, which aims to bridge the gap between those who have the resources to access legal services versus those who don’t.

Access to justice is much more than that, he said. It includes an awareness of the courts and what they do.

To this end, the division’s main focus is to think of all the ways a court user might find obstacles or impediments to accessing justice, including the use of plain English in judgments and the way letters are written.

In the past, letters from the court were written with lawyers in mind, which meant they came full of jargon and lingo. Now, letters have also been redesigned with self-represented people and laypeople in mind.

“We had a project to look at how to redesign the way our letters look with highlights and boxes and different forms to emphasise the key things … How do we make sure that the recipient can see that information, understand it, and find it quickly at that level? That’s access to justice,” said Chief Justice Menon.