There's a famous passage in Lord Cockburn's Memorials of His Time where the great Scotch judge and leading Whig stigmatizes some of his Tory predecessors on the bench, including the terrible Lord Braxfield, who presided over what Cockburn called "the indelible iniquity" of the sedition trials of 1793 and 1794. "Let them bring me prisoners, and I'll find them law," Cockburn quotes Braxfield as saying privately, also whispering from the bench to a juror he knew, "Come awa, Maister Horner, come awa, and help us to hang ane o' thae daamned scoondrels."

Braxfield most certainly has his political disciples on the Scottish bench today, in the persons of the three judges who traveled to the Netherlands to preside over the recent trial of the two Libyans charged with planting the device that prompted the crash of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie in 1988. In the first criticism of the verdict, Hans Koechler, a distinguished Austrian philosopher appointed as one of five international observers at the trial in Zeist, Holland, by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, has issued a well-merited denunciation of the judges' bizarre conclusion. "In my opinion," Koechler said, "there seemed to be considerable political influence on the judges and the verdict."

Koechler's recently released analysis of the proceedings, in which the judges found one of the two accused Libyans, Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, guilty while exonerating his alleged co-conspirator, Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah, is by no means an exercise in legal esoterica. Basically, he points out that the judges found Megrahi guilty even though they themselves admitted that his identification by a Maltese shop owner (summoned by the prosecution to testify that Megrahi bought clothes later deemed to have been packed in the lethal suitcase bomb) was "not absolute" and that there was a "mass of conflicting evidence."

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