One does not have to be a legal realist to think that the reasons that are used to justify judicial decisions do not always explain how those decisions came about. If that is the case, it is an important task of legal scholarship to look behind the published opinions of judges and analyse what influences judicial decisions. Many scholars, most notably the proponents of the attitudinal model of judicial decision-making, believe that the explanation of judicial decisions must focus on the values and attitudes of individual judges, that is, the input of the decision-making process. Others, however, suggest that the key to the understanding of judicial decisions is the process itself, in which judicial decisions are forged. Professor Paterson clearly belongs to the second camp: both in his previous book on the subject, The Law Lords (1982), and in his most recent work, Final Judgment, analysing the work of the final appeal court of the UK, he defends the claim that judicial decision-making is a collective or social process. Although this claim is rather abstract, the contrast with the attitudinal model is informative enough to locate his position in the literature.
Paterson's book covers the final years of the House of Lords and the formative years of the new Supreme Court. Although the book draws heavily on The Law Lords, and is built on the same methodological framework, it would be a mistake to consider it only an updated version of The Law Lords. While the main organising concept of the former volume is that of social roles, the more recent one revolves around the dialogues that take place between judges and other relevant actors and groups. The book is structured around the dialogues that judges engage in with counsel, fellow judges, other courts, academics, judicial assistants, and the other branches of the government.
The major difficulty of this kind of enterprise is that judicial decision-making is, to some extent, a black box to legal scholars. While scholars interested in the voting patterns of judges can rely on publicly accessible data, the process that leads to the final judgment is anything but transparent. For instance, we do not have records about judicial conferences in the UK and do not know whether, how, and why judges changed their position between the first conference and the publication of the judgment; our knowledge about this process can derive only from insiders. Paterson's research, relying primarily on elite interviews and hitherto...
