Lawyers in UK Central Government : Key Specialists in a Generalist Bureaucratic Culture

Article

The UK Supreme Court - A Fine New Vintage, or Just a Smart New Label on a Dusty Old Bottle?

The machinery of UK governance, including many aspects of the legal system, has undergone a lot of important changes in the last decade or so. Some of these changes have been driven by ‘New Public Management’ ideas about the need to increase ‘efficiency, effectiveness and economy’, to sharpen public accountability and to improve the quality of customer service in the administration of justice - as has been happening with other parts of the public service sector. Some important reforms (notably devolution of functions to elected administrations in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland and the passing of the Human Rights Act 1998) have been parts of a wider political agenda of modernising Britain’s antiquated ‘unwritten’ constitution. Some of the most senior judges themselves, a category of office holder once regarded as doctrinally opposed to any kind of radical change, have become articulate champions of reform and have carved out new, high profile managerial roles for themselves, as well as becoming markedly more ‘activist’ in the public law and human rights arena when sitting on the Bench

The jurisprudence of British Euroscepticism:<br> A strange banquet of fish and vegetables

Parliamentary sovereignty, meaning that the validity of Acts of Parliament cannot be challenged in the courts, has long been a core principle of the uncodified British Constitution. Much of the political controversy in the 1960s and ’70s about UK membership of the European Communities focused on the transfer of law-making functions to the EC Commission and the Council of Ministers. The role of the European Court of Justice, and the possibility that both the ECJ and the UK’s own domestic courts might entertain challenges to domestic primary legislation, on the grounds of its incompatibility with EC law, was largely overlooked. It was not until the mid-1980s that British ‘Eurosceptics’ began to realise that the courts might pose a challenge to parliamentary sovereignty. A turning point was the Factortame litigation, in which the ECJ reaffirmed that domestic legislation that conflicts with EC legal obligations must be disapplied. A decade later, in the ‘metric martyrs’ case, a British court, without referring the issue to the ECJ, decided an important principle of EC law. Both these cases – the focus for much political lobbying – underline the extent to which the courts have acquired a much higher political profile in the UK than they have had in the past

The Judicialisation of ‘Administrative’ Tribunals in the Uk: From Hewart to Leggatt

<p>This paper traces the development of administrative tribunals in the UK, from the modern phase of their development in the second half of the 19th century, via some constitutional controversies in the first half of the 20th century, to the radical overhaul of the tribunal system that has been taking place in the last few years – in parallel (so far as recent developments are concerned) with other major reforms of the machinery of justice. The story is one of a fairly steady movement towards an increasing formalisation and judicialisation of the tribunal system. In this context ‘judicialisation’ means that tribunals have become more and more like ordinary courts, adopting formal and increasingly adversarial procedures (thereby perhaps making life harder for unrepresented appellants, the traditional core-users of the system). We will consider whether this tendency is, on balance, a good thing. We will also need to reflect on whether – recent reforms notwithstanding – the word ‘system’ is strictly apposite in this context, given the piecemeal development and continuing diversity of tribunals; and whether use of the adjective ‘administrative’ may beg too many questions about the nature and raison d’être of tribunals (hence the inverted commas round the word in the title of this article). Sometimes the more neutral adjectives, ‘special’ or ‘specialist’ have been used. Important landmarks in the history of tribunals have been the reports of three major official inquiries – the Donoughmore Report, (Donoughmore, 1932), the Franks Report, (Franks, 1957) and the Leggatt Review, (Leggatt, 2001). The terms of reference of these inquiries, discussed in the body of the article, can be found in Appendix 1. Appendix 2 lists some of the main administrative tribunals that were under the supervision of the (former) Council on Tribunals1 in the mid-1990s, before the changes set in motion by the Tribunals, Courts and Enforcement Act 2007. Appendix 3 gives a snapshot of the (still evolving) reformed tribunal system, following the coming into force of the 2007 Act. 1 On 1 November 2007 the Council on Tribunals was replaced by the Administrative Justice and Tribunals Council, established by the Tribunals, Courts and Enforcement Act 2007. See below.</p