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Research on the English Judicial Process

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2009

Lawrence Baum
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Extract

This article is an examination of the English judicial process as a subject of research. My perspective is that of a political scientist whose major field of interest has been American judicial politics. If my subject were the House of Commons or party politics in Britain, it would be appropriate to focus my examination upon an evaluation of the relevant political science literature. But political scientists thus far have virtually ignored the English courts as an object of study; the limited scholarship done on this set of institutions has been contributed chiefly by social scientists in other fields and by legal scholars. For this reason, my primary goal is not to assess the existing literature on the judicial process. Rather, I wish to communicate this literature to political scientists and to suggest directions that they might take in studying the judicial branch.

Type
Review Article
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 7 , Issue 4 , October 1977 , pp. 511 - 527
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1977

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References

1 Following the general practice of those who write about the courts in Britain, I am restricting my attention to the judicial system of England and Wales, which I will refer to as ‘English’. The judicial systems of Scotland and Northern Ireland are largely separate from that of England. See Morrison, Fred L., Courts and the Political Process in England (Beverly Hills, Calif, and London: Sage Publications, 1973), pp. 1–2.Google Scholar

2 See Patterson, Samuel C., ‘Review Article: The British House of Commons as a Focus for Political Research’, British Journal of Political Science, III (1973), 363–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 Some of this scholarship is discussed in a recent examination of work on legal sociology from an historical perspective. See Campbell, C. M. and Wiles, Paul, ‘The Study of Law in Society in Britain’, Law and Society Review, X (1976), 547–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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74 By ‘political’ litigation I mean litigation undertaken to obtain general judicial policies rather than individual gains; admittedly, both conceptually and empirically the distinction between political and other litigation is not a sharp one.

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81 Much of the American work concerned with civil decision making focuses upon small claims courts. See Yngvesson, Barbara and Hennessey, Patricia, ‘Small Claims, Complex Disputes: A Review of the Small Claims Literature’, Law and Society Review, IX (1975), 219–74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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