Courts in the United Kingdom

Chapter
Courts
Britain
Author

Chris Hanretty

Published

January 1, 2020

Abstract

Courts in the United Kingdom have evolved gradually over the past seven hundred years. The modern court system is sophisticated, dis- playing both specialisation by area of law and regional differentiation. Courts display moderate to high levels of de facto judicial indepen- dence without many guarantees of de jure judicial independence. Appointment to the courts system is now very strongly apolitical; this, coupled with a weak form of fundamental rights review, means that debates about judicial politics have been limited. Despite this, UK courts offer lessons for those interested in the introduction of rights catalogues and in theories of constitutional review.

Full-text

The version accepted by the publisher is available here. The (gated) version of record is available here.

Replication data

This is a review article, with no original quantitative data.

Citation

Hanretty, Chris. 2020. “Courts in the United Kingdom.” In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics. Oxford University Press.