‘The lawfulness of state actors’ decisions frequently depends on the reasons they give 
to justify their conduct, and a wide range of statutory and constitutional law renders otherwise lawful actions unlawful if they are not justified by reasons or are justified by the wrong reasons’(Mathilde Cohen. Sincerity and reason-giving: when may legal decision makers lie? DePaul Law Review, Summer 2010).
Last week, Chief Justice (ag) Roxane George gave a written ruling which, with some elaborations, followed the oral decision she gave a few months ago. The gist of her decision is to be found in the final pages of her ruling, where she stated that it was unnecessary for the list submitted by the Leader of the Opposition for the president to choose the chairperson of the Guyana Elections Commission to contain judges or persons qualified to be judges, that the entire list is not unacceptable if the president finds one or more of the persons thereon to be unacceptable, that the president is required to state reasons for deeming each of the six names on the submitted list as unacceptable and that he was not obliged to select a person from the six names on the list as a result of a failure to determine positively that the persons thereon are unacceptable as fit and proper persons for appointment.
