Category: Judiciary
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Conor McCormick: Monitoring the Judiciary
Judges primarily decide cases, but they also make strategic decisions aimed at maintaining the constitutional authority of the judiciary as a whole. Doctrines, bundling, timing, and public engagement are among the means by which trust, arguably the most important foundation of judicial authority, is acquired and disbursed. It can be difficult to identify and evaluate…
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Lewis Graham: Judicial Ideology and Supreme Court Appointments
Appointing Supreme Court Justices When a vacancy arises on the UK Supreme Court (UKSC), how is it filled? And what considerations are taken into account when deciding on which qualified candidate to appoint? The answer to the first question is easy enough to answer: the Lord Chancellor convenes an ad hoc selection commission, which must…
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Hal McNulty: Forgetting Our Democratic Settlement: Lammy’s Plan to Curb Jury Trials
“I honestly think if I hadn’t had those normal people to basically say, ‘You gotta be joking, no way did this guy do anything wrong’, I’d be finished” (recent defendant Jamie Michael, commenting on his jury acquittal). The Justice Secretary’s proposal to restrict the use of jury trials has been met with furious opposition from all sides. So far,…
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Paolo Sandro: Parliamentary democracy under the veil of secrecy: the Afghan leak super-injunction case as a bonfire of constitutional principles
Introduction On Tuesday last week it emerged that a mind-boggling data breach by the UK government – and the momentous policy decisions taken in its wake – had been kept a secret from all but a handful of people across the three institutions of the state for nearly two years. In a nutshell, in August…
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Online Guest Lecture by the Right Honourable the Chief Justice of Malaysia
The Global South Network (GSN) invites you to attend an online guest lecture titled “Constitutional Supremacy in Southeast Asia: The Case of Malaysia” by the Right Honourable the Chief Justice of Malaysia, Tun Tengku Maimun binti Tuan Mat. The lecture will take place on Friday 23 May 2025, from 9:30 to 10:30 AM (UK time) [17:30 to 18:30 Malaysian…
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![Josie Welsh: “[No audible response]” is not how the Lady Chief Justice leads her judiciary](https://ukconstitutionallaw.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/picture-1.jpg)
Josie Welsh: “[No audible response]” is not how the Lady Chief Justice leads her judiciary
In an earlier blog post, I noted that we would be waiting with interest to see how the (then newly appointed) Lady Chief Justice of England and Wales (LCJ), Baroness Carr, would use her power, whether statutory or social. This post offers a reflection on two recent public appearances by the LCJ: the LCJ’s Annual Press Conference on…
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David Sugarman: The Politics of Judicial Decision-Making in the UK’s Top Court: Lessons from the Pinochet Case
Does the judge who hears a case affect the outcome and, particularly, in the U.K.’s top court? This is a question that has received increasing attention of late. In this blog post, I utilise my research on the behind-the-scenes proceedings in the Pinochet case (1998-99) to address this question, stressing the role of the judges’ personal values,…
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Max Taylor: A Role for Parliament in Independent Judicial Appointments: A Comparison with the Comptroller and Auditor General
The Starmer ministry plans to ‘…deepen our democracy by reforming Parliament…’, but missing from its proposals is any reconsideration of whether Parliament should adopt a role in judicial appointments somewhat analogous to that of the US Senate in federal judicial appointments (US Constitution, Art II, s 2). Debate about such a proposal has recurred from…
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Dane Luo: R (Jwanczuk) v Work and Pensions Secretary: Bringing a Comparative Lens to Judicial Precedent on Inter-jurisdictional Laws
The Supreme Court will hear the appeal in R (Jwanczuk) v Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (UKSC/2023/0152) on 11 and 12 March 2025. One of the issues is the circumstances in which courts in England and Wales may depart from decisions of appellate courts in Northern Ireland and Scotland regarding laws of inter-jurisdictional…
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![Elizabeth Adams: The Judicial Approach to the Judicial Discretion under s.4 HRA in Secretary of State for Business and Trade v Mercer [2024] UKSC 12](https://ukconstitutionallaw.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/elizabeth-adams-e1548439339676.png)
Elizabeth Adams: The Judicial Approach to the Judicial Discretion under s.4 HRA in Secretary of State for Business and Trade v Mercer [2024] UKSC 12
In Secretary of State for Business and Trade v Mercer [2024] UKSC 12 (Mercer), the Supreme Court was confronted with whether and how to exercise its powers under sections 3 and 4 of the HRA 1998. This blog post will focus on assessing how the Supreme Court approached the judicial discretion to grant a declaration…