Category: Judiciary
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Andrii Koshman: Judicial Accountability in the Digital Justice System of Tomorrow
In 2018, Sir Ernest Ryder warned that the future shift to online dispute resolution for most, and in some areas all disputes, risks eroding judicial accountability and fostering a democratic deficit. The pandemic, the £1.3 billion court modernisation program and six years later, the future of resolving the majority of disputes online appears to be…
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Sammy Talalay: The Lord Chancellor, the independence of the judiciary and the rule of law
At the beginning of the year, this blog covered the report from the House of Lords Constitution Committee into the Lord Chancellor and the Law Officers, with Conor Casey’s post focusing in particular on the latter. This post aims to ensure that 2023 is bookended by consideration of the issues addressed in the committee’s report – and…
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Ronan Cormacain: What’s wrong with the Safety of Rwanda Bill?
The Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill was introduced into Parliament on 7 December 2023. According to its long title, its purpose is to facilitate “the removal of certain migrants” to Rwanda. Without even looking at the international law dimensions, the Bill contains constitutionally troubling provisions. Firstly, it purports to legislatively state “facts”. Secondly, it usurps the judicial function by purporting…
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Katia De Blasio: Recent Developments on the Status of EU Derived Case Law
Brexit has been and continues to be a complicated process to understand, especially for continental lawyers. Nevertheless, it is interesting to try to study its dynamics and how, if at all, the law implemented within more than four decades of being part of the European Union will continue to affect the British legal system. In…
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Josie Welsh: The Power of a (Lord) Chief Justice
From 1 October 2023, England and Wales will have its first female Lord Chief Justice (‘LCJ’), with the recent news that His Majesty The King was ‘pleased to approve’ Dame Sue Carr’s appointment to the office. Her appointment follows the announcement of the retirement of current Lord Chief Justice The Rt Hon. Lord Burnett at the end of September.…
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Michael Foran: Interpretation after the Human Rights Act? The Principle of Legality and the Rule of Law
Last week Liz Truss’s cabinet decided to shelve the proposed British Bill of Rights. Quite a lot has been said about the Bill since it was announced and many have welcomed the quiet demise of what was perceived by some to be a dangerous inroad into our human rights protection. Others have suggested that the…
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Lewis Graham: The Reed Court by Numbers: How Shallow is the ‘Shallow End’?
In a recent critical essay for the London Review of Books, Conor Gearty penned a wonderful, if provocative, account of the recent output of the UK Supreme Court, and attributed a substantial amount of influence to its President, Lord Reed. His “commitment to formalism”, said Gearty, has led to a series of decisions which shrink…
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Stefan Theil: Missing the Forest for the Trees – Deficits in Doctrinal Methods and How Data Can Help
Introduction Law and legal scholarship have a problem: a problem with digesting and analysing the sheer volume of decisions reached every year by domestic and international judicial bodies. From January to March 2021 alone, Her Majesty’s Courts & Tribunals Service (HMCTS) recorded 72,000 receipts and disposed of as many cases, with an outstanding caseload of…
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Roger Masterman: Reasserting/Reappraising Dualism
Dualism is considered a staple characteristic of the UK’s constitutional order. Recognised as a necessary derivative of the concept of parliamentary sovereignty, the notion of dualism is ‘based on the proposition that international law and domestic law operate in independent spheres’ and that interaction between those spheres is formally contingent – in the forum of…
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Andrew Geddis and Sarah Jocelyn: Is the NZ Supreme Court Aligning the NZBORA with the HRA?
The New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990 (NZBORA) and the United Kingdom’s Human Rights Act 1998 (HRA) share common constitutional DNA. Both are “parliamentary bills of rights” that eschew a judicial power to invalidate rights-infringing legislation. However, the two rights instruments historically have diverged in a couple of important ways regarding the form of…