Why do UK Supreme Court Justices read aloud their judgments? All UKSC (and Privy Council) judgments are published and can be read and downloaded for free. So why do Justices read parts of them aloud, as you can see on UKSC's official YouTube channel? I'd certainly think that lawyers can read for themselves! Are they intended for the illiterate? As you can also see, very few people attend these declamations, barring the landmark cases.
Because it’s the default The law requires: Judgment A judgment may be— (a) delivered in open court; or (b) if the Court so directs, promulgated by the Registrar
Contemporary decisions of domestic British courts (e.g. the Supreme Court) are not binding in foreign jurisdictions. They may be persuasive for courts there, because there is a common legal tradition and the U.K. judiciary is often considered to be quite good. Some countries have preserved a right of appeal to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council (aka &quot;The Queen in Council&quot;). This body is basically the same judges as the Supreme Court but sitting in a different room. As the JCPC their decisions are precedential in wherever the appeal came from, and potentially elsewhere if the law in question is the same. Corollary: JCPC decisions are not precedential for British courts, unless the JCPC goes out of its way to say so. In these cases, the JCPC applies the law and constitution of the origin country, which can include retained pre-independence British laws as well as the common law. That country could pass a subsequent statute or constitutional act overriding the JCPC's decision (as Parliament could in the U.K.), so that country retains ultimate control even though one of &quot;its&quot; courts is a shared one sitting in London. This arrangement can cause dissonance. For example, some Caribbean countries would like to execute people, but that is prohibited in the U.K.; the JCPC continues to permit executions to go ahead in some cases, even though that would be illegal if the same judges were in a different room hearing a British case. There are very occasional cases from Brunei, whose law is determined by the Sultan and includes aspects of Islamic law not known in the U.K. legal tradition.
No The case was dismissed on procedural reasons. Like this. Well, perhaps not so pedantic but there are things that have to happen before the Supreme Court can get involved and they haven’t. For example, the Supreme Court only has original jurisdiction in a limited classes of case; if this isn’t one of those (and it isn’t) it has to be heard in a court that does and then get appealed up the chain. When they have, the court will make a decision on the merits.
Different courts have different practices, but I believe the general practice is for plaintiffs to use exhibit numbers, and for defendants to use exhibit letters. As with most procedural questions, the final decision belongs to the judge. The repetition in letters comes in when you get to the end of the alphabet. After you've used A-Z, you go to AA, BB, CC ... ZZ, then AAA, BBB, CCC, and so on.
If six justices decided that the case were sufficiently important, they could refrain from recusing themselves so as to be able to hear it. If that didn't happen, the lower court's ruling would stand, as you suggest. If I understand this rule correctly, if four justices had conflicts of interest, the court would lack a quorum. That's more likely, though admittedly very unlikely. However unlikely it may be, it has actually happened (for example, Shao v. Roberts).
If you're in the USA, this almost certainly falls under fair use, or if you are in another jurisdiction, it almost certainly falls under an analogous exception for educational use. The fact that the excerpt is short contributes to this conclusion. You can also avoid having to rely even on these exceptions by choosing sources that are in the public domain. The specific date before which a work is guaranteed to be in the public domain depends, again, on your jurisdiction, but it's probably sometime in the early 20th century. For example, you're certainly on solid ground if you use Dickens.
All precedents are made in court judgements Courts exist in a hierarchy which means there are two kinds of precedent: binding and persuasive. A binding precedent is one set in the same hierarchy by a higher level court. A persuasive precedent is one set at the same or lower level in the hierarchy or in a completely different hierarchy. For example, a precedent set in the Supreme Court of New South Wales sitting as the Court of Appeal is binding on the Supreme Court of NSW in general session, the District Court and the Magistrates Court (lower courts), persuasive on the Supreme Court of New South Wales sitting as the Court of Appeal and all courts in Victoria and Queensland (different hierarchies) and is not a precedent for the High Court of Australia (higher up). In general, while a lower level court can, in theory, set a precedent, such cases are rarely reported so nobody knows about them and, in any event, they would only have limited applicability. Therefore most precedents come from higher level courts which means, they are usually set in appeals rather than trials of first instance. In addition it is only the ratio decidendi that sets binding precedent. Anything in the judgement that is obiter dicta is merely persuasive. Bear in mind that the overwhelming majority of cases do not create precedent - they follow it. Or, if they don’t follow it, the judge was wrong. It is also a legal fiction (i.e. something pretending to be true that everyone knows isn’t) that judges do not create law by precedent - they merely find the law that was already there. Since the role of judges in common law jurisdictions is to only decide cases, they cannot and do not offer opinions on what the law is outside of that. This is a long-standing tradition in English law and the first Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court confirmed that the Constitution did not change this. Therefore, the only way to test the validity of a new law is to have a trial that uses it. That said, governments have lawyers review legislation and regulations before they are promulgated to check for things like legality and workability but these are only professional opinions and are not binding. Furthermore, sometimes legislation is drafted quickly for political reasons. One hopes that legislatures take proper care when drafting legislation that it is legal, is workable and actually makes sense: one is often disappointed in that hope.
One important formal difference is that self-represented litigants cannot claim the same costs if they prevail in a civil case. Costs are capped at 2/3 of what they would have received, had they been represented. (&quot;Disbursements&quot;, such as court fees, are not subject to the same limit.) Moreover, their deemed hourly rate is £19/hr, unless it's possible to demonstrate that they've incurred greater financial loss as a result of doing the work. This is much less than the billed rate for qualified counsel. A less practical privilege is wearing gowns and wigs. Self-represented litigants are not allowed to pretend that they are barristers by donning their finest horsehair, or going on about &quot;my learned friend&quot;. Solicitor-advocates are &quot;my friend&quot; but laypeople should not use this language at all. Outside of the courtroom, ordinary people can in principle do their own conveyancing (for example), but there are many practical obstacles. One is being fully exposed to the costs of mistakes. Mortgage lenders will often refuse to let random members of the public take care of the legal intricacies, and some solicitors on the other side will advise their clients not to bother. There are also a few technicalities which are easier for practicing solicitors, such as access to DX (a specialist private postal service) for shuttling reams of paper documents across the country. Case law (Domb v Isoz [1980] 1 All ER 942) lets solicitors effect an exchange of contracts by telephone, but this has not been recognised for other people, who continue to have to do it physically.