Why was the house of lords seen to have such supreme legal wisdom as to be designated as the court of last resort in the UK? Indeed their judgements seemed often to be quite sage, insightful, and eloquently given. But why would that tend to be the case? As I understand it, to become a lord, one must inherit a seat through the noble peerage; the House of Lords is not elected. Thus, while they will be likely to nearly all possess some substantial degree of education, class, and culture, it seems as though there is hardly anything to guarantee that any of them, much less any definite subset, will have had any particular degree of legal training. Where did they used to derive their legal wisdoms from? I suppose I am missing to an extent the fact that they are after all along with the House of Commons the very ones who devised most legislation in the UK to begin with, so that they can be nearly guaranteed to understand it and to accurately divine its true original intent.
The origin of Parliament was from the curia regis, the King's Court. In that early form, the King's Court exercised both judicial and legislative functions. In 1215, with the Magna Carta and the beginning of Parliaments, the House of Lords assumed the judicial functions of the King's Court. Prior to 1876, it was possible for any member of the House of Lords to hear appeals. Eventually, however, the judicial function tended to be exercised by those appointed specifically to judicial office in the House of Lords, although this was not a formal restriction until 1876. Since 1876 and until 2009, the judicial function of the House of Lords was formally restricted to be exercised by the Law Lords (see s. 5 of the Appellate Jurisdiction Act 1876). However, the outcome of the appeal was also still formally an action of the entire House of Lords, on the recommendation of the panel of Law Lords that heard the appeal (see Stanley Clark, &quot;Gentlemen, Their Lordships&quot;, p. 1443-44). And custom was that only the Law Lords that heard the appeal would vote, with all other members of the House of Lords abstaining.1 Rather than lords via hereditary peerage, the Law Lords were Lords/Ladies holding special qualifications and having received specific appointment to be a &quot;Lord of Appeal in Ordinary.&quot; Among other qualifications, they would have already served in a high court or practised as a barrister for fifteen years. As an example of the kind of background a person might have before appointment as a Law Lord, this is Lord Denning's Wikipedia introduction: He was called to the bar of England and Wales in 1923 and became a King's Counsel in 1938. Denning became a judge in 1944 when he was appointed to the Probate, Divorce and Admiralty Division of the High Court of Justice, and transferred to the King's Bench Division in 1945. He was made a Lord Justice of Appeal in 1948 after less than five years in the High Court. He became a Lord of Appeal in Ordinary in 1957 and after five years in the House of Lords returned to the Court of Appeal as Master of the Rolls in 1962, a position he held for twenty years. In 2009, the judicial function of the House of Lords was transfered to the UK Supreme Court. The Law Lords at the time became the first justices of the UK Supreme Court. 1. Citation practice is to indicate that a judgment is from the House of Lords by using parentheses after identifying the reporter. E.g.: &quot;Livingstone v. Rawyards Coal Co. (1880), 5 App. Cas. 25 (H.L.).&quot; Starting in 2001, the House of Lords used vendor-neutral citations managed by the British and Irish Legal Information Institute. The vendor-neutral citations for judgments from the House of Lords use &quot;UKHL&quot; as the abbreviation. BAILII has also provided many older judgments from the House of Lords with unofficial neutral citations following the same convention.
SCOTUS blog regularly does posts on that kind of topic (see, e.g., their Stat Pack) and if you looked at their sources or the authors of those posts, you could probably easily find more. There are people who do that and make their findings publicly available, but I don't know them off hand.
"Ignorance of the law" refers to a (non)-defense for committing a crime ("I didn't know it was against the law"). In this case, the government hasn't passed a law saying that "the term 'simple majority' shall always be defined as..." – there is no law saying that "simple majority means more than half of the total number of votes". Instead, terms are generally given their "common meaning". A reasonable case can be made that the common meaning of "majority" is "more that any other choice", and one can point to ample evidence showing that, such as this. However, one can also argue that extra weight should be given to to specialized definitions appearing in The Standard Code of Parliamentary Procedure or Robert's Rules of Order (or other such document), in support of a competing definition of "simple majority". Both sides will need to provide evidence that supports their interpretation of the phrase, based on external sources (parliamentary handbooks, dictionaries, and so on), as arguments for a particular interpretation of the term. The courts will be most impressed by evidence pertaining to the behavior of the parties, so that if everybody agrees that they understood "simple majority" to be "the choice with the most votes", then that is how the term will be interpreted.
One direct statement about this is in White v. Tommey [1853] 10 E.R. 483, in which the House of Lords had to consider whether to allow a rehearing of a case which they had previously decided, on the basis that there had been misrepresentation the first time round which affected their judgement. The Lord Chancellor, Lord Cranworth, said: What ought your Lordships to do in this state of things? It was pressed very strongly on the part of Tommey by his counsel, that your Lordships in truth have no jurisdiction; that after a matter has once been heard and adjudicated upon in this ultimate Court of appeal, there is an end of it, that there must be an end somewhere, and that if it can be said that the trustees can be heard now to come and call in question the decree of 1850, what is to prevent Mr. Tommey coming afterwards, in 1860, and praying your Lordships to reconsider it again, and so toties quoties to the very end of time? In this case, the Lords sent the case back to the Court of Chancery in Ireland, setting aside their earlier orders relating to the appeal. This did not amount to a rehearing of the merits in the House of Lords, but their correction of a mistake in the proceedings and restoring the status quo ante. In an earlier case, Stewart v. Agnew [1823] 1 Shaw 413, another Lord Chancellor, Lord Eldon, observed: It is infinitely better that the matter should be here finally decided upon one hearing, even if the decision is wrong, than that there should be a new litigation unknown to our proceedings, as to this matter of rehearing; - nor can any one say where it is to stop. In general, it is to be hoped that the decisions of this House are right; but, whether right or wrong, it has been taken for granted that considerations of infinitely greater moment than the considerations which arise out of the particular mischief in particular cases, have led this House to determine, that where a matter has been heard between parties at the Bar, and the House has given its decision upon the merits discussed by those parties, the House will not rehear the cause.
Basically, it is a historical accident with a healthy mix of partisan politics thrown into the mix. The history is recounted here. Circuits were much less important until the intermediate U.S. Court of Appeals for the various circuits were created by Congress, in the Judiciary Act of 1891, commonly known as the Evarts Act, established nine courts of appeals, one for each judicial circuit at the time. Before that time, circuits were simply an administrative tool of the U.S. Supreme Court for assigning work loads of justices assigned to tasks in connection with these circuits, which was adjusted from time to time with the 9th Circuit being the last one to be created in the pre-intermediate appellate court era. The Tenth Circuit was established on February 28, 1929, under Tenth Circuit Reorganization Act of 1929, which broke the then-Eighth Circuit into the Eighth Circuit and the Tenth Circuit. The circuits have generally have had three or more states, have not split any states, and have been contiguous. As new states were admitted this ended up leaving lots of states in the 9th Circuit and there was no where else to add Hawaii and Alaska. Reassigning a state from the 9th Circuit to an existing circuit is complicated because it leaves open the question of which circuits precedents to turn to for pre-split law. If one turns to the new circuit's pre-reassignment case law, the law in the reassigned states suddenly changes on a variety of issues upon which people have acted in reliance on the old law. If one turns to the old circuit's pre-reassignment case law, then the case law is not uniform for all states in the circuit. Politically, splitting up the 9th Circuit has been discussed seriously many times, but there has not been a political consensus around a particular proposal to do it. The fact that the 9th Circuit has quite a few states in it really isn't the main issue. The issue is that it has a huge number of cases relative to the other circuits. As a result, a split is justified by the sound non-partisan reason that it is much larger in terms of caseload than any other circuit giving it more judges, twenty-nine, than any other circuit, and limiting the effectiveness of its en banc review process which doesn't include all sitting judges to resolve intra-circuit concerns about a three judge appeal panel's resolution of a case. The conservative states whose politicians want out of the left leaning 9th Circuit don't have enough population, collectively, to justify a circuit of their own, and wouldn't be fully contiguous, which makes their politically driven split proposals problematic. Arizona, Idaho, Montana and Alaska would like to be in a more conservative circuit. Hawaii, Washington State, Oregon, and California, are by and large, content to be in a liberal leaning circuit. Nevada is relatively ambivalent, but it is convenient for it to be in the same circuit as California because the two states have so many economic ties with each other that sharing the same body of federal precedent is convenient. Guam and the Marianas Islands, which are U.S. territories in the 9th Circuit, don't really have a say in the matter. California is also so dominant in terms of case load, that a California plus one or more states solution for one of the resulting circuits in a split, with the remaining states in another circuit, leaves the circuit with California in it overloaded and too large, while the remaining states in the other circuit with too small of a docket. More than 50 percent of the Ninth Circuit caseload comes from the Central District of California. This is more than the caseload of some other entire U.S. Court of Appeals circuits. California as a whole accounts for about 63% of the 9th Circuit's work (about 18 judges worth), and about 13% of the number of appeals lodged nationwide. The First Circuit, which includes Maine, New Hampshire, Massachussetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut, is the smallest of the U.S. Court of Appeals Circuits which manages with just six judges, about half as many as are necessary to consider appeals from the Central District of California alone.
The law does have examples They are called “judgements” Every case decided by a court is an example, in common law jurisdictions at least. When those cases are decided by an superior court they become precedents - binding “examples” on courts in their hierarchy and persuasive “examples” on other courts. When you go to a lawyer for advice, she doesn’t just parrot back the statute, she looks at the precedents and decides whether the case decided by the House of Lords in 1848 or the High Court of Australia in 1912 more closely matches your situation. Also, statute law often has examples written into them Statues exist in hierarchies, Constitution, Acts, Regulations, Departmental Policies etc. and the lower you go the more specific the law is and the more likely it is to have examples. For example, this answer I wrote for another question quotes examples from the new-south-wales Evidence Act.
The legal system advances practitioners on a number of criteria, not all of which relate to their legal education. It's essentially the same for all professions - your schooling/education may or may not determine your success in the field. Also relevant would be the social circles you navigate, your achievements post-education, and so on.
Because the courts or the legislature decide they have them There is no doubt that both the courts and the legislature in common law countries have the ability to find, create, or extend rights and this has been done in the past. This is, in fact, where legal rights were created. The US Bill of Rights was created by the people in 1791. If the people in 2191 want to grant rights to AIs then they can do this. This is legally possible. Whether it's a good idea is a matter of philosophy and politics.