The Supreme Court of the United Kingdom and English Court Judgements

19 Pages Posted: 22 Feb 2014

See all articles by Neil H. Andrews

Neil H. Andrews

University of Cambridge - Faculty of Law

Date Written: February 3, 2014

Abstract

The Supreme Court of the United Kingdom, which heard its first case in 2009, replaced the Appellate Committee of the House of Lords (sections II and III of this paper). The Supreme Court’s decisions will be binding on all lowers civil and criminal courts in England and Wales and Northern Ireland, and on Scottish civil courts if the appeal emanates from Scotland. The Supreme Court controls its own case load. It decides fundamental questions concerning judge-made law (the 'Common Law', including the auxiliary body of substantive and remedial law known as 'Equity') and questions arising from statute, including human rights legislation and points of European law and European human rights law. But there are powers of extra-territorial recourse to the Court of Justice of the European Union in Luxembourg (matters governed by the European Union) and by the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg (concerning the European Convention on Human Rights). Section IV addresses the problem of excessively long judgments (the problem is exacerbated, as noted in section V, by the tendency for appeal judgments in the British appeal courts, including the Supreme Court, to contain separate judgments by the different members of the relevant tribunal). Section VI examines the occasional difficulty arising from the advocates’ joint decision to confine their submissions to particular legal issues and to refuse to open up for decision wider legal issues, even though those matters are relevant to the dispute and ripe for judicial exposition or re-examination.

Keywords: Supreme Court of the United Kingdom, permission to appeal, over-long judgments, separate judgments by appellate judges, court’s power to broaden the scope of legal analysis relevant to a dispute, curia novit legem doctrine (in civilian systems), appeal

JEL Classification: K4, K40, K41

Suggested Citation

Andrews, Neil H., The Supreme Court of the United Kingdom and English Court Judgements (February 3, 2014). University of Cambridge Faculty of Law Research Paper No. 23/2014, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2399103 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2399103

Neil H. Andrews (Contact Author)

University of Cambridge - Faculty of Law ( email )

10 West Road
Cambridge, CB3 9DZ
United Kingdom

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