The Moral Cost of Delay: Reflections on Managing Judicial Reserves

“Reserves do not improve with age. The longer a decision sits unwritten, the heavier it becomes.”

When the Honourable Deena Baltman (retired) offered this observation during a recent continuing professional development session for Deputy Judges, she articulated something that every judge knows but rarely voices. Her presentation, titled Managing Reserves, was pragmatic and concrete: write promptly, ideally within 48 hours; avoid over-reserving; schedule writing time ruthlessly; resist the temptation to wait for motivation, inspiration, or provocation.

Yet what has stayed with me is not just the efficiency of her techniques but the unspoken premise beneath them: that timeliness in judging is not merely procedural – it is equally moral. This raises questions that I have been considering for some time: what makes delay in judicial decisions ethically troubling; how promptness relates to the integrity of judicial reasoning; and why managing judicial reserves often feels less like time management than conscience management. That notion of conscience management highlights what I will explain later as Promptness as Fidelity.

The Hidden Demands of Judging

Judging is not mechanical work. It requires sustained attention, empathy, and a moral stamina that can fade under pressure – especially when managing multiple reserves after emotionally demanding hearings. However disciplined we try to be, judging also humbles us. It exposes the limits of memory and perception, reminding us that even the most diligent mind can lose clarity if it waits too long to translate thought into written reasons.

Courtrooms typically project composure, but beneath that calm surface lies the ongoing work of maintaining cognitive sharpness and moral focus. Even the best self-discipline cannot erase the emotional residue of difficult cases. Each decision requires not just intellectual clarity but also emotional steadiness, and both are finite resources. Writing promptly, in that sense, is not merely about output; it is about capturing the reasoning while it remains alive and unclouded by the exhaustion that follows prolonged indecision. A fatigued mind does not just slow down – it risks dulling sensitivity to nuance, empathy, and fairness.

The Ethical Principles for Judges (Canadian Judicial Council, 2021) recognize this challenge under the principle of Diligence, urging judges to “perform their judicial duties with punctuality and reasonable promptness” while maintaining their own health and capacity to judge. This framing acknowledges that timeliness is inseparable from wellness. The quality of justice depends not only on what a judge knows but on whether the mind delivering it remains rested and clear.

There is, however, a complication worth acknowledging. Not all delay reflects avoidance or fatigue. Some cases resist premature resolution; their complexity demands time for reflection, for testing conclusions against the record, for allowing unconscious reasoning to surface. Some delay is also structural. Limited judicial capacity and crowded dockets can mean that there are simply not enough dedicated hours in the day to hear, absorb, and write. In that situation, reserves can accumulate not because a judge is indecisive, but because the load is just too heavy. The challenge lies in honest self-assessment: distinguishing necessary deliberation from procrastination dressed as prudence, while also recognizing when delay reflects structural overload rather than personal hesitation. When does taking a moment to think become avoiding the work? That line is not always clear, and conscience alone may not reliably mark it.

This tension is not unique to any single judge; it is structural to the work itself. Acknowledging it openly is not an admission of weakness but an act of institutional honesty. Confronting the reality collectively may be part of how the judiciary preserves its integrity as an institution.

The Moral Texture of Delay

What troubles me most about delay is not its administrative cost but its moral one. It corrodes confidence – both public and personal. For the parties, each day of silence can feel like a sign of indifference; for the judge, it chips away at self-trust. A lingering reserve becomes a weight not just on the docket but on the conscience as well.

We often describe delay as a systemic problem – caseloads, scheduling, or institutional limits. That framing treats it as an operational failure. But delay has a moral texture. Each unrendered decision represents a suspended moment of justice. Every passing week stretches the thread of accountability a little thinner. The parties who appeared before the court did not simply present legal arguments; they entrusted the system with their disputes, their livelihoods, sometimes their dignity. That trust creates an obligation that endures long after the hearing has ended.

Judicial delay, then, is not simply about productivity. It is about promise – the promise to decide, to resolve, to bring closure. When that promise is deferred, something corrodes – not just efficiency but the moral authority of the office itself. The ethical duty of diligence, reflected throughout the Ethical Principles for Judges, ties timeliness to integrity: delay is not only a practical lapse but a moral one, for it risks weakening public confidence.

There is another dimension that the Principles gesture toward but do not fully articulate: delay distorts the judge’s relationship with their own reasoning. The longer a decision sits unwritten, the less it rests on what was directly perceived in the hearing and the more it depends on a reconstruction from memory. Fine details fade. The cadence of testimony and the interactional dynamics in the room – elements that provide context (though not determinative weight on credibility) and that transcripts only partly capture – slips into abstraction. What remains is a cleaned-up narrative, shaped by time and the mind’s tendency to impose coherence on what was, in the moment, raw and contested.

Promptness as Fidelity

The notion of promptness as fidelity explains why the discipline of writing promptly is not fundamentally about productivity. It is about fidelity – fidelity to the accuracy of one’s perceptions, to the humanity of the parties, and to the integrity of the judicial role.

A decision written while evidence and impressions remain fresh is more faithful to what unfolded. It captures immediacy – the pacing of testimony, the shifts in tone, the intensity in the room – elements that shape understanding but never fully survive in a transcript. Judges can return to the record for what was said, but no transcript can fully reproduce how it was said or how it landed in the moment. As time passes, those non-verbal and relational cues fade. The risk is that reasons begin to rely less on what was directly experienced and more on a cleaned-up reconstruction. Cognitive research supports part of this concern: memory is reconstructive, not archival; over time, recollection becomes increasingly vulnerable to alteration rather than remaining a faithful record of perception (Howe 2015). The longer the distance between hearing and reasons, the easier it is for the decision to become technically accurate, yet emotionally hollow – correct in law but detached from the lived reality of the parties. Judicial scholarship on emotion likewise warns that when judges retreat into emotional detachment as a coping strategy, they risk producing reasons that are formally correct but estranged from the human reality of the case; that erosion of engaged empathy can, in turn, undermine how justice is experienced in the courtroom (Maroney 2013).

Judicial writing authorities consistently stress beginning reasons while impressions remain vivid. In Canada, Edward Berry’s Writing Reasons is widely used for structure and clarity, and judicial-education programs (including those offered by the National Judicial Institute) pair that craft guidance with a practical norm: start drafting while the hearing is still fresh. The aim is not only to finish efficiently, but to preserve the accuracy of perception so the decision reflects the immediacy and integrity of what occurred in court. This principle is echoed abroad. The National Judicial College of Australia’s Judicial Decisions: Crafting Clear Reasons advises judges to begin when memory is fresh – before fine details of evidence and courtroom tone fade. Across common-law jurisdictions, timeliness in writing reasons functions less as a managerial discipline than as a safeguard of accuracy and fairness.

Yet this argument has its limits. Some judges write beautifully reflective reasons because they allow time for synthesis and perspective. There is value in letting complex issues settle and in seeing patterns that emerge through sustained reflection. The real question is whether the trade-off – gaining perspective while losing immediacy – serves the interests of justice or merely the comfort of the writer. The answer varies by case, but the default should favour promptness unless complexity genuinely demands otherwise. That judgement call cannot be reduced to a formula, and it properly remains with the judge.

Conscience as the Internal Clock

The judicial oath is grounded in an undertaking to do right impartially – often expressed, in the traditional Canadian judicial oath, as a duty to act “without fear or favour, affection or ill will.” That obligation is usually described in terms of fairness between parties. Less explicitly, it also carries an expectation of moral accountability to the work itself. Every judge knows, even if it is never said aloud, that justice delayed sits uneasily on the conscience.

Conscience is the judge’s internal clock. It is the quiet pressure that builds when a decision sits unresolved. It is the awareness that the file on the desk is not just paper; it is someone’s unfinished story, someone’s unresolved grievance, someone’s life in suspension. That weight is not bureaucratic. It is personal. It follows you home, into the evening, into the next sitting day. It can colour how you enter a new hearing because part of you is still carrying the last one that you have not yet given back to the parties.

This is why managing reserves is not only a question of time management or productivity but about conscience management. An outstanding reserve can become a kind of private ethical debt. The longer it lingers, the more it threatens a judge’s sense of integrity: “Am I still discharging the duty I undertook to the parties in that room?” That moral drag is not abstract. It can dull focus, sap confidence, and make it harder to meet the next case with a clear and fully available mind.

There is, of course, an external dimension to this as well. The Ethical Principles frame timeliness as a core aspect of diligence and expect decisions and reasons to be produced as soon as reasonably possible, with an outer guideline of six months for reserved judgments absent special circumstances. Read that way, delay is not merely a practical lapse; it risks weakening confidence in justice and undermining the authority that flows from diligent performance of the judicial role. Delay does not simply slow justice – it distorts it. It introduces doubt where there should be resolution and can shift the judge’s relationship to the work from active engagement to passive avoidance. Timeliness protects moral clarity: the sense of purpose that allows a judge to sit in judgment without being slowly hollowed out by what is still unfinished.

Sustaining the Work

No amount of discipline can fully protect against the fatigue inherent in judicial life. Emotional recovery is part of the craft, not a deviation from it. Judges must learn how to “reset” between hearings – to clear cognitive space so that each decision receives fresh attention.

That reset may take the form of deliberate solitude, physical movement, or creative pursuits outside the law. Whatever the method, it acknowledges that clear judgment depends on a clear mind. The best writing habits mean little without the corresponding habit of renewal.

The Ethical Principles make this link explicit: judges are encouraged to maintain a healthy work-life balance as part of their duty of diligence. This is not indulgence. It is preservation of judicial capacity. Judges who burn out risk producing reasons that are mechanically adequate but morally disconnected from the human stakes of the cases before them.

Addressing the moral cost of delay requires not only personal discipline but institutional recognition that judging is an emotionally demanding vocation.

Conclusion

I left the Honourable Deena Baltman’s session with a clearer understanding of what has long troubled me about judicial delay. It is not just a procedural failing. It is an ethical failing.

Prompt reasons are not simply efficient – they are faithful. They show respect for the parties, for the institution, and for the fragile trust that sustains the justice system. They help preserve the integrity of judicial reasoning by capturing it while it remains alive, and they help protect the judge’s conscience from the slow erosion that accompanies prolonged avoidance.

Every unfinished reserve is, in a sense, a promise deferred. Managing reserves is about keeping that promise – not to the calendar, but to our conscience, and through conscience, to the litigants whose lives are in limbo. The conversation that prompted these reflections was a reminder that judging is a shared craft, refined through dialogue and the humility to learn from one another. That, too, is part of the discipline of timeliness.

The suggestion to write promptly may sound managerial, but it is something deeper: an acknowledgement that judging is a moral commitment demanding both clarity of thought and integrity of action.

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Dr. Ayodele Akenroye, Ph.D. (McGill) writes on judicial ethics, decision-making, and the moral dimensions of justice, with broader interests in criminal law, technology in courts, and systemic equity. He has served in various adjudicative and legal roles in Canada and abroad. Views are his own and do not represent those of any organization. This context is provided for transparency; Justice Baltman had no involvement in this reflection or its preparation.