Law

In the context of the far-reaching reforms proposed for the Appellate Committee of the House of Lords and the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, this book considers the operation and reform of courts at the apex of the UK's legal systems. The chapters are linked by broad and overlapping themes. The first of these is the complexity of accommodating national differences within the UK into the institutional design of the new supreme court. It will be not only a court for the UK's three legal systems, and simultaneously a national institution of the whole UK, but it is also likely to be called upon to resolve division of powers disputes within the emerging system of multi-level government. A second theme is the scope for comparative lesson-learning from top courts in other legal systems: the Supreme Court of Canada, the US federal courts system, and the constitutional courts in Germany and Spain are considered. Thirdly, the connections between the UK's top-level court and other courts, especially intermediate courts of appeal, the European Court of Justice, and the European Court of Human Rights are examined.

Judges spend their public lives in courtrooms. They speak to the public through their judgments. But senior judges are frequently invited to contribute to professional, judicial, or academic conferences or publications, on whatever topic engages the attention of the audience at the time. This book contains a selection of the essays and addresses written or given by the present Senior Law Lord (as a Queen's Bench judge, Lord Justice of Appeal, Master of the Rolls, and the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales) over the last 15 years or so, touching on a wide range of legally related topics.

A sense of crisis in the administration of civil justice is present in many countries. Delays and high costs render access to the civil courts either useless or prohibitively expensive or both. The crisis takes different forms. In some jurisdictions the problems lie in high and unpredictable costs but in others there are overcrowded courts and exorbitant delays. Those interested in civil justice will be familiar with their own system but they will seldom have knowledge of other systems. The chapters in this book survey different systems of civil justice from other jurisdictions. An understanding of other systems will enrich reform discussions in each country by drawing attention to common problems, to their roots, to the solutions tried and, above all, to the consequences (for better or for worse) of reform. This book shows that we can learn from others' successes but that we may find the failures even more instructive.

In the final decade of the twentieth century the legal profession witnessed profound changes. First the Conservatives sought to apply laissez-faire principles to the profession. Then Labour transformed the legal aid scheme it had created half a century earlier. At the same time, the profession confronted cumulative changes in higher education and women's aspirations, internal and external competition, and dramatic fluctuations in demand. This book analyses the politics of professionalism, the struggles among individual producers (barristers, solicitors, foreign lawyers, accountants) and their associations, consumers (individual and corporate, public and private), and the state to shape the market for legal services by deploying economic, political, and rhetorical resources (including changing conceptions of professionalism). The profession had to respond to a greatly increased production of law graduates and the desire of lawyer mothers (and also fathers) to raise their families. It had to replace exclusivity with efforts to reflect the larger society (class, race, gender). The Bar needed to address challenges to its exclusive rights of audience from both solicitors and employed barristers and decide whether to retaliate by permitting direct access, thereby compromising its claim to be a consulting profession. Solicitors had to reconcile their invocation of market principles against the Bar with their resistance to corporate conveyancing and multidisciplinary practices. The government had to restrain a demand-led legal aid scheme; practitioners and their associations sought to pressure the government to expand eligibility and raise remuneration rates.

The power and influence of the federal judiciary has been widely discussed and understood. And while there have been a fair number of institutional studies of individual district courts or courts of appeal, there have been very few studies of the judiciary that emphasize the judges themselves. Although previous studies provide numerous statistical facts, they do not answer the two most important questions relating to the federal judiciary: who the judges are and what they do. Federal Judges Revealed considers approximately one hundred oral histories of Article Three judges, extracting the most important information. The material is organized thematically so that practitioners can easily access professional areas of interest. Topics include “How judges write their opinions” and “What judges believe make a good lawyer”. The book considers the background of the judges through college, law school, military service, clerkships, practice lives, and their appointments to the federal bench. It allows the reader to evaluate Federal judges based on their own words without an intermediary.

Access to justice, equality before the law, and the rule of law are three fundamental values underpinning the civil justice system. This book examines these values and how they are a crucial foundation of the civil justice system and a powerful argument for arrangements such as legal aid, the impartial application of law, and the independence of the judiciary. It also considers the role of procedure, often regarded as of secondary importance compared with substantive law. It discusses Lord Woolf's inquiry, and demonstrates how procedural reform can maximize a fundamental value like access to justice. This linkage is furthered in a later analysis of access to justice comparatively, in relation to civil and commercial law. It then looks at understanding how law works, and how it could be made to work better, and concludes that this demands both knowledge of law and of law's context. This theme deals with the machinery of the law, and discusses what the courts do, civil procedure, and the ethics of lawyers' conduct, all in relation to the broader context of access to justice. This broader context of the law is particularly prominent in the latter half of the book, which deals with various dimensions of the impact of the law.

This book is a work in socio-legal studies, examining the functions and effectiveness of law in the countries of the former Soviet Union. As the transition away from communism enters its second decade, the countries involved are confronted by an apparent failure of law. Understanding the newly formed social order in which law is powerless is a challenge to the assumptions of western jurisprudence. The contributors to this book take up that challenge. Using the framework of contemporary theory, ten specialists in different aspects of social science analyse the status of post-communist law from a variety of perspectives. Their emphasis is on the interplay between law and social norms, informal practices, and human values. Their work contributes to several of the wider ongoing debates in socio-legal studies: on the rule of law and its role in maintaining social order; on the interaction between law and social norms, the relation between legitimacy and legality; and on the relative merits of solving problems by informal means such as networking or the use of intermediaries rather than by formal, institutionalised processes. At the same time, the book is intended to meet the needs of those interested not just in law but in the post-communist region. Blending theory with case studies, each contributor focuses on a single sector, such as the political system, worker-management relations, human rights, the machinery by which law is made and implemented, or the cultural and historical background of the societies under consideration. The majority of the chapters draw directly upon the authors' own experience and empirical research.

This book presents an evolutionary account of law and government. It contends that the law of any human community is a self-generating, self-recognizing system of human communications that signals likely action within that community. Law in effect is a system that uniquely serves and symbiotically defines a community regardless of any moral right claims. Understanding law as a self-fulfilling signaling system frees us to discard the fabrications of authority rooted in creationist accounts of law and government. The book articulates a fresh conception of law that builds on Oliver Wendell Holmes' celebrated insights concerning law's predictive potential. The book considers important implications of this new understanding for how we individually make moral choices, how we read law, and some of the many other ways that law affects our lives.

Our legal system is built on the trustworthiness of lawyers: clients must trust their fidelity, adversaries their undertakings, and courts the veracity of their legal and factual claims. Lawyers who betray trust undermine these foundations. Although legal scholars focus on refining the ethical rules, we know very little about the nature and reasons for their violation. The files of disciplinary proceedings are an underutilized resource for understanding lawyer deviance. This book mines the reports of New York disciplinary proceedings to illuminate the three most common and troubling categories: neglect of clients, overcharging, and excessive zeal. Because their livelihoods are at stake and they possess technical skills and resources, disciplined lawyers litigate these cases very thoroughly; those found guilty offer intimate personal details in mitigation during the penalty phase. The book concludes with practical recommendations for reducing lawyer deviance and restoring trust.

Lawyer misconduct affects many people: clients, adversaries, opposing counsel, judges, the legal profession, and society at large. The records of disciplinary proceedings offer a penetrating, and largely ignored, perspective on how lawyers misbehave. Because the lawyers' professional lives are at stake, the factual records are extraordinarily detailed and the lawyers surprisingly open about their motivations and justifications. This book presents the stories of ten California lawyers who broke the rules: hiring an ex-cop to chase ambulances, flouting fee limitations in medical malpractice cases, creating a fictitious company and impersonating non-existent people in order to appropriate Sega's computer games, a former California Real Estate Commissioner defrauding developers and financiers, helping a represented co-defendant negotiate a plea without his lawyer's participation or knowledge, and defying a judge's sealing order and his own client's wishes for closure in order to champion the “defenseless” and “oppressed” and protect “widows and children”. The book begins by showing how nearly a century of political struggle over self-regulation shapes the way the disciplinary system selects and processes cases and concludes by canvassing reforms that could improve the performance of the legal profession.