Description
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC Final Judgment: The Last Law Lords and the Supreme Court by Alan Paterson
The House of Lords for over 300 years the UKs highest court was transformed in 2009 into the UK Supreme Court. This book provides an unrivalled view into the workings of the Court during its final decade and during the formative years of the Supreme Court. Drawing on over 100 interviews including a total of 36 Law Lords this is a landmark study of appellate judging from the inside by an author whose earlier work on the Court has provided seminal. The book demonstrates that appellate decision-making in the House of Lords remains dialogue-based but is now more varied being face to face oral written symbolic contemporary asynchronic and virtual. The range of dialogues is also more extensive including with foreign courts (especially Strasbourg) and with Judicial Assistants. The interface with counsel remains central to the decision-making process but written arguments have doubled in size whilst oral argument has been halved. The research reveals that during its last decade the House of Lords was only intermittently collegial while certain Law Lords were adept at utilising techniques for consensus building and influencing colleagues to bring about a change in the majority decision of the court.The modern expansion in judicial review has given rise to another dialogue with Parliament leading to a constitutional struggle between the highest court and the other branches of government which masks an accountability problem recently exacerbated by our doctrine of separation of powers. The book examines mechanisms for handling this democratic deficit including reform to the selection procedure for Supreme Court Justices and greater transparency in decision-making.