Administratively Independent

Are actors in governmental institutions (ie the legislature, the executive, and the judiciary) administrators of the law? An administrator is a person responsible for carrying out the affairs of an institution. Law is the whole body of principles, rules, processes, practices, formally or customarily recognized as binding and may be enforced by the right-holding entity against the duty-bearing entity.

Separation of powers or duties is a governance model of public administration. The will of the governed is expressed via the legislature that makes the law, the executive that enforces the law, and the judiciary that applies the law in specific cases. The separation design instills checks and balances among the different institutional roles as the actors each would not have absolute power in the intertwined operational system, thus achieving the collective governmental goal to provide and protect the governed.

The governance model as actually practised often does not provide for strict separation of powers or duties among the institutions, particularly between the legislature and the executive. However, the independence of the judiciary from the legislature and the executive has been the common constitutional norm, if not yet the standard. This is because judges are charged with the ultimate decision over life, freedom and property of the governed, and judges should decide matters without any restrictions, improper influences, inducements, pressures, threats or interference, direct or indirect, from any quarter or for any reason.

Although we often refer institutional actors by their specific functional roles - legislators administer law by making it to advance public interest, executive administers law by enforcing it to secure public order, and judges by applying it to dispense justice. While calling judges as administrators is uncommon though not incorrect in the general sense, the central issue is whether the constitutional norm of the independence of the judiciary is actually being upheld. Since the turn of the century, I have exercised quasi-judicial functions as Hong Kong Registrar of Trademarks, WTO Dispute Settlement Panelist, and Arbitrator of Shenzhen Court of International Arbitration, and I was administratively independent!