Introduction

In order to understand some of the material in this book, you will need also to understand, at least in outline, the jurisdictions of the principal English courts as well as the EU’s courts and the European Court of Human Rights.

The principal statutes governing the jurisdictions of the English courts include the Magistrates’ Courts Act 1980, the Senior Courts Act 1981 (renamed from being the Supreme Court Act 1981 by the Constitutional Reform Act 2005), the County Courts Act 1984, the Courts and Legal Services Act 1990, the Civil Procedure Act 1997 and the Constitutional Reform Act 2005. (Other statutes deal with the sentencing powers of criminal courts and the administration of various courts, but these topics are beyond the scope of this book.)

One complication which is worth noting at this stage is that the Supreme Court Act 1981 constituted the Supreme Court as consisting of the Crown Court, the High Court and the Court of Appeal (omitting the Appellate Committee of the House of Lords which, although often referred to as a court – as indeed it is in this book – was technically not a court at all, being rather a committee of one of the Houses of Parliament). The Constitutional Reform Act 2005 created what is now the Supreme Court, to which it transferred the jurisdiction previously exercised by the Appellate Committee of the House of Lords and – as we saw in the previous paragraph, renamed the 1981 Act as the Senior Courts Act, to reflect the fact that the Crown Court, the High Court and the Court of Appeal were subsequently to be known as the Senior Courts rather than as the Supreme Court. The consequence of this is that whenever you see the expression the Supreme Court used in the context of the English legal system, you need to ask yourself when that expression was being used, so that you know which one of its two meanings was intended. Admittedly, the answer to this question will usually – and increasingly – be obvious, since the expression will almost always mean the current Supreme Court. However, it is easy to become complacent when ambiguous terms almost always bear the same one of their two meanings, and therefore to overlook the possibility that you have encountered one of the occasional instances in which they bear the other meaning.