Van onafhankelijk magistraat tot rechter-bureaucraat: factor van rechtsstatelijke (des)integratie?

As long as we rely on human beings to resolve conflicts with respect for legal certainty and justice, a continued investment in (a realistic assessment of) the condition humana is crucial. This (for lawyers rather atypical) thesis wants to render plausible the claim that Belgian judges are having a rough time. To that end we develop, on the one hand, a 'phenomenological' argument - i.e. we lay bare phenomena and symptoms that become highly visible when one aims at carefully sketching the "judicial condition" - and, on the other hand, we focus in a more philosophical manner on the reasons as to why the women and men on the bench have to discharge their judicial duties and considerable responsibilities under all but common circumstances, with the juridization of the social fabric, the judicialization of politics, and the judiciary's bureaucratization inducing unpalatable consequences and nervousness regarding the separation and collaboration of powers. In order to justify all this, a quite circumstantial problematization as well as an explanation of the rather unusual methodology was needed. Indeed, a fairly essayistic approach with its inevitable digressions was adopted and aggregated insights from multiple disciplines were applied. In the second part, some four phenomena, among which judicial candor both in- and outside the courtroom as well as the rise of New Public Management-thinking, are commented upon and are contextualized more broadly. A longer third part attempts to trace these symptoms back to the rather reductionist anthropology undergirding the "classic" image of the judge as "bouche de la loi". Free will skepticism and radical-immanentism (with collectivisms and statisms as somehow predictable result) are linked to the phenomena studied in the second part, and subsequently criticized. Being increasingly forced to empathically render custom-made verdicts in plain language, judges operate in a far from obvious societal climate characterized by a certain meaninglessness, by frequent calls for more government interventionism, and by a lasting and sometimes even cultivated opaqueness. Upon reflexion, it is somewhat understandable that radicalisms of different stripe flourish nowadays. A thorough reconsideration of the task (and scope) of both government and legal training, and a realistic, confidence-building transparency when it comes to pertinent aspects of the personality of (future) judges (as is the case abroad and especially in common-law syst