We are all judges. We judge people by what they wear, how they speak, what they eat, where they live, how they spend their money and whom they choose to spend their time with. We judge decisions, relationships, governments, institutions, countries and events unfolding thousands of kilometres away. We judge books by their covers, people by their photographs and increasingly, entire lives by a few seconds of video. Judgement is perhaps one of the most effortless things human beings do.

But there is a rather important distinction we rarely stop to make: having an opinion is not the same as having the capacity to judge well. A judge, after all, is not simply someone who knows the law. Society does not hand someone a judicial position merely because that person has read enough legal books. There are qualifications, training, procedures, standards of evidence, principles of impartiality and mechanisms of review. A judge is expected to listen, examine, distinguish fact from assertion, consider competing arguments and importantly, give reasons for a decision. In other words, the system recognises something rather fundamental: judgement is a responsibility.

And yet, outside a courtroom, we appoint ourselves judges with remarkable enthusiasm. No qualifications required. No evidence required. No hearing of the other side required. Sometimes not even the complete sentence is required. We hear half a conversation and reach a conclusion. We see an action and decide what kind of person must have performed it. We encounter a decision whose circumstances we know nothing about and immediately pronounce it sensible or foolish, selfish or generous, intelligent or absurd. Perhaps this is where we need to pause. Because we very often do not know where the individual is coming from.

We do not know what happened before the conversation began. We do not know what preceded the sentence we heard. We do not know what the person has been carrying silently. We do not know the circumstances behind the decision that appears........

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