The object of this book is to explain the system of law courts and allied matters relating to the administration of justice. In the past the administration of justice has hardly been considered a ‘subject’. Writers on constitutional law have included the system of the courts, but necessarily cannot give it much space; other law books are apt to assume that the reader is acquainted with the subject. Thought about law has changed a good deal in the last twenty years. The attempt to treat law as a pure science, isolated from the society it serves, is succumbing to a more sociological approach. To some extent this means that the lawyer must come down from his high perch and look at law in the light of its effects upon individuals and society. The best introduction to law is a study of the institutions and environment in which lawyers work. It is prescribed, under the title of ‘The English Legal System’, for the first year study in some law schools, although academic tradition has there succeeded in imposing a mass of historical study to satisfy the idea that it is cultural to know what happened in the middle ages and not cultural to know what happens in the twentieth century.