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This book contests the existence of "judicial independence". It maintains that civil servants, historically and up to the present day, have advanced executive mission-creep and eroded common law principles via their influence over the
Judges' Rules.
List of contents
- 1: Introduction and Overview
- 2: The Management of Criminal Justice: An Early Challenge
- 3: The Origin of the Judges' Rules
- 4: The Aftermath: 1918-1960
- 5: The First Draft: The Judges and the Home Office
- 6: The War of Attrition and the Vanquishing of the Judges
- 7: The Legacy of the 1964 Rules
- 8: Rule of Law and Common Law
- 9: Constitutionalism and the Westminster Model
- 10: The Politics of the Judiciary
- 11: The Global Diaspora
- 12: Appraisal and Review
About the author
Mike McConville is Honorary Professor at the University of Nottingham and Founding Dean of the faculty of law, at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Mike has been the Head of Law at the University of Warwick, the City University of Hong Kong, and the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He has researched and published widely in the area of socio-legal research in England and Wales, the USA, and China. Areas that he has covered include, the investigative and prosecution process, plea bargaining, the jury, policing, neighbourhood watch, criminal defence.
Luke Marsh is Associate Professor at the faculty of law at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and Door Tenant at 25 Bedford Row, London. He has held visiting appointments at the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge, Columbia (New York), Auckland, Waseda (Tokyo), Nottingham, and UCL. Luke was the co-founding General Editor of Archbold News (Hong Kong) and is widely published in the area of criminal justice and human rights. His most recent work examines the erosion of the adversarial process in the English criminal justice system.
Summary
This book contests the existence of "judicial independence". It maintains that civil servants, historically and up to the present day, have advanced executive mission-creep and eroded common law principles via their influence over the Judges' Rules.
Additional text
The publication more than four decades ago of research which demonstrated the pervasiveness of the unmentionable practice of plea bargaining provoked fury, consternation, and threats of suppression. Mike McConville and Luke Marsh's book The Myth of Judicial Independence is certain to generate an even greater furore. Rather than focusing on the roles of individual judges, police, prosecutors, and defence lawyers, this book (based on original archival data) exposes the politicization of criminal justice at its core - debunking the policies crafted and implemented by the Home Office and senior judges. It will force a fundamental reconsideration of the 'Westminster Model' at the very moment when it is under enormous stress.
