Judgment:
1. Asif Saeed Khan Khosa, J.:Cricket and judicial decision making may not have much in common except that there is an umpire in the game of cricket deciding 'appeals' and judging various issues arising during the progress of the game and there may be some judges sitting in their courtrooms who may sometimes be tempted to hit the ball over the boundary rope. Likeness of a judge to an umpire in a game of cricket has already been alluded to by none other than Lord Denning in his judgment delivered in the case ofJones v. National Coal Board[(1957) 2 Q.B. 55]. His lordship had observed that "Even in England, however, a Judge is not a mere umpire to answer the question "How's that?". His object, above all, is to find out the truth, and to do justice according to law;". Another common factor between the two is that both cricket and judicial decision making are played/ practised by gentlemen, and now by noble ladies as well. All of us know that cricket has moulded itself over time and has adapted to the requirements of the changing times but judges, being conservative by nature and tradition, have so far been slow in such transformation or adaptation. Keeping pace with the requirements of the modern times as well as constraints of time concomitant thereto a five-day test match in cricket is giving way to a one-day match and even to a blitz called T20 and although Garry Sobers, Hanif Muhammad and Sunil Gavaskar are still idolized for their marathon efforts and long hauls in batting yet the present day heroes are the likes of Shahid Afridi who, notwithstanding the shots they play or the techniques they employ, are applauded for their obsessive, if not neurotic, hitting and for scoring as many runs as possible within the shortest possible time. As against that the judges are generally still sticking to their old and archaic styles of writing their orders and judgments which is causing a disconnect between the judiciary and the litigant public because the decision making is slow, long and out of pace with the influx of cases asking for decision, if not out of sync with the expectations of majority of the stakeholders. We have found the present case to be a classic example of such a disconnect as despite about one hundred and eighty thousand cases pending and clamouring for decision before the Lahore High Court, Lahore the learned Judge- in-Chamber of the said Court had indulged in the luxury of writing as many as twelve pages for dismissing the petitioner's application for bail which matter was merely an interim matter pertaining only to regulating custody of the petitioner during his trial. We feel that the matter could have been decided by the learned Judge-in- Chamber through a much shorter order saving the Court's precious time for attending to other similar matters of urgency.
2. In the background of this Court's accumulated experience over a long period of time and the wisdom gathered through the same we feel that time has come for breaking away from the attitudes and approaches of the past and for out of the box solutions to situations which apparently have no traditional