Chief Justice Mohamed Dzaiddin Abdullah is in an unenviable position of having much on his hands.

Before the public controversy generated by the recent Federal Court decision dismissing ex-deputy premier Anwar Ibrahim's appeal has subsided, the judiciary is now embroiled in another public spat between High Court Judge R K Nathan and Court of Appeal Judge Gopal Sri Ram.

Nathan alleged that Gopal had made personal attacks against him during a July 25 Court of Appeal sitting that set aside a RM10,000-00 fine imposed on lawyer Lee Chan Leong for allegedly committing contempt before Nathan in April 1999 ( New Straits Times , Aug 1).

The questions that immediately arise is whether this public spat is a manifestation of a new form of judiciary's independence, and also whether one of these judges can hold the other for contempt of court for the public allegations, and who will adjudicate that.

Judges traditionally are supposed to insulate themselves from public controversies instead of directly generating them.

This is in order to preserve the mystique of this particular group in the community comprising a select and elitist part of the honourable legal profession, entrusted day after day with the exercise of considerable power for meting out justice, and whose exercise has dramatic effects upon the lives and fortunes of parties who come before them.

In line with this tradition, the public altercation is most unfortunate and does no credit to the image of the judiciary.

This in turn leads to the reasonable expectation that as between two feuding judges whose controversy was brought to the front page of a national newspaper, at least one of them, eventually determined to be at fault for 'unjudicial' temperament, will have to be relieved off the position.

A greater problem is when a judge, so determined, refuses to resign and go.

Will there then be another tribunal constituted of more senior judges to look into judicial conduct or misconduct as in the previous case of ex- Lord President Salleh Abas?

We await breathlessly to see further developments.