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5 - ‘Patching up the courts’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 September 2009

Patrick Polden
Affiliation:
Brunel University
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Summary

TINKERING WITH THE MACHINERY OF JUSTICE

Reform of the courts was in the air again at the end of the war, with a lively correspondence in The Times in 1944 and a continuing debate on legal aid, but it was not a high priority for Attlee's government, which preferred for the most part to create tribunals to deal with new entitlements and disputes.

Tribunals were a familiar feature of wartime emergency legislation and now even the courts' role in deciding purely private disputes was being questioned. The Uthwatt Committee on Tenure and Rents of Business Premises, for example, while reluctantly giving jurisdiction over its scheme to the county court, had wished to find a way of ‘avoiding as far as possible the atmosphere of litigation associated with its normal procedure’. Another committee was able to keep the fixing of ‘fair rents’ for controlled housing away from the courts, though most county court judges were happy to lose that, having quite enough to do with possession cases. Still, the lack of confidence in their capacity was worrying, especially when it also deprived them of workmen's compensation, felt by the Solicitor to be the harbinger of ‘a process [which], if allowed to continue indefinitely, would eventually lead to the Courts becoming quiet backwaters, like Doctors' Commons at the beginning of the 19th century’. It did not happen, but the anxiety was understandable.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1999

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