THE JUDICIAL HOUSE OF LORDS 1876–2009. Ed by Louis Blom-Cooper, Brice Dickson and Gavin Drewry Oxford: Oxford University Press (www.oup.com), 2009. lxxxvi + 820 pp. ISBN 9780199532711. £100.
| Author | Adam Tomkins |
| DOI | 10.3366/elr.2011.0062 |
| Published date | 01 September 2011 |
| Date | 01 September 2011 |
| Pages | 483-484 |
This is a terrific book, from which there is much to learn. I keep dipping into it (it's not a book to read cover to cover in as few sittings as possible) and it keeps on giving. There is much of it that I shall return to and it will become, I'm sure, a much loved encyclopedia. The book, of course, is commemorative. It was published to coincide with the passing of the Appellate Committee of the House of Lords, as the United Kingdom Supreme Court took on its responsibility as Britain's senior court. It is edited by three of the UK's leading students of courts and judges: Blom-Cooper and Drewry have collaborated before on this topic and Dickson's previous work includes the intriguing volume,
The book's forty chapters are attractively arranged in five parts, opening with a series of essays on the institution itself: its background, nineteenth-century genesis, organisational development and eventual abolition. Part 2 examines the judges: the role of the Lord Chancellor, judicial appointments, the men who served (there was just the one woman), and the Law Lords’ roles in Parliament (this aspect of the story being told by Lord Hope). Included in this part is a fascinating account of the making and subsequent use of the 1966 Practice Statement (by which their Lordships gave themselves permission to change their minds, and to depart from prior House of Lords authority “when it appears right to do so”) and an entertaining account of the style of judgments. These pieces, both by Louis Blom-Cooper, are among the many gems of the book.
In Part 3 we move to a five-stage history of the Appellate Committee. Probably the only group of essays in the book which is better read together than individually, the account offers reminder after reminder that history – even legal history – is man-made and not pre-ordained. These pieces should be required reading for anyone who has lost sight of just how contingent and unplannable law-making through litigation must be, even in an appeal court staffed by judges as similar to one another as, for the most part, were the Law Lords. Part 4 broadens...
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