Since my name has been mentioned, I'll post some thoughts about the topic in question.
It's not so much that I would be against an
independent judiciary as much as I would be against a
standing judiciary, where the same group of people are allowed to make arbitrary decisions with impunity. The reason that the Fundamental Laws are the way they are goes back to several incidents back in Spiritus when The Salaxalans was the Chief Justice of their Supreme Court. In one particular incident, he forbid the military from taking part in any missions after Cormac filed a politically motivated case regarding public access to military logs. It's a decision that could have harmed the region, its interests, and its allies...what if the SDF had been fighting a coup or was involved in a major operation at the time?
We tend to think of standing judiciaries as insulated from the politics of the other branches, but especially in NS it's the other way around...it's a branch insulated from the reaction to its own potential political decisions. Not only that, but standing judiciaries in NS are usually extremely inactive because there's usually few cases brought up. This was what we were thinking when we split from Spiritus and began drafting the Fundamental Laws.
The reason the the Storting was selected to hear cases is that membership wasn't just because there were fewer members back then, but because it was a branch of government that was answerable to someone...the Overhusen, to the Monarch and the Underhusen, to the Citizenry. Additionally, I wanted the law to be interpreted by people who were familiar with the region and with its laws...and who better than the people that make the laws? On paper, it meant that cases would be tried by people who were familiar with our laws, who would be accountable, and who would not just sit around with their thumbs up their asses until there was a case.
In practice, the implementation has proved to be...flawed, due to some oversights on my part. That's the reason I drafted the
Administration of Justice Amendment Act, the legislation Chanku alludes to. It would have created a pool of jurors, the
Lagmand Rådet, which would've been open to current and former members of the Storting pending their approval by both the Storting and the Monarch. I felt that it was still important that cases be heard by people familiar with the laws and the region, but this would have opened up the group just a bit.
It also fixed what I consider to be the biggest oversight in the current system, the fact that the Storting can choose to ignore a filed case and not consider it either way. When we drafted the Fundamental Laws, it was assumed that the Storting would at least consider all cases that were filed, even if it chose after discussion not to accept some of them, but thus far all cases have been ignored without comment. My proposed amendment required all cases to be considered by selecting the justices as soon as the case was filed and then having them consider if the case was to be accepted.
But as Chanku said, the proposed amendment first failed in the Overhusen, then was tabled in the Underhusen without vote. And here we are now...
This has been a fine episode of The History of the Wintreath judicial system.