The appointment of judges by ministers: political preferment in England 1880 - 2005

Article
Courts
Britain
Author

Chris Hanretty

Published

August 1, 2015

Abstract

I investigate appointment to the Court of Appeal and House of Lords between 1880 and 2005. Exploiting the fact that appointment is almost invariably from within the ranks of existing High Court judges and using a conditional logit model, I test for effects of legal, professional, and political factors on appointment prospects. Although there is no advantage to having the same political affiliation as the appointing lord chancellor, judges are more likely to be promoted if they were previously appointed by the incumbent party.

Full-text

You can find the version accepted by the journal here. The (gated) version of record can be found here.

Replication data

Replication data can be found at the Harvard Dataverse

Citation

Hanretty, Chris. 2015. “The Appointment of Judges by Ministers: Political Preferment in England 1880 - 2005.” Journal of Law and Courts 3 (2): 305–29. http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/681543.