The English Legal System: Optimization and Simplification?

In opinion of many, the English legal system might seem a bit tangled and complicated. Well, I must agree it is sincerely candid and quite fair. It is indeed. The same time, complexity of the English legal system very much preserves traditions and history, retains significant traits of the UK monarchy and cherishes peculiarities of the governance over centuries.??

States are developing and social relations are becoming more and more complicated over times, what in general evokes the necessity of new approaches in effective and productive regulation.

As I come from the civil law system, one of the key issues I can see in the UK legislation is the absence of codification, barely at all. Say, when dispute occurs regulations of one piece of social relations might be scattered over numbers of law sources, and some of them might have been adopted over one hundred years ago. In other words, if you as a lawyer need to build up a solid winning litigation strategy or simply to forecast a case court perspective, you have to dive into dozens and dozens of divided acts, which may compete and collide with each other.

?Sometimes it is going to be sort of challenging for professionals and absolutely unreachable for lay individuals with no or weak legal skills. Codification as a specific work of the Parliament on bringing numbers of acts into one complex, specialized act or code might simplify the law use and its application, and could be a good shot to review and fight collisions of rules.

The UK court system, as for my humble opinion, is oversaturated with different courts, chambers, divisions and, the most important, levels. Factually, the court system is divided into four levels or instances, and jurisdiction and powers of particular court often overlaps. One and the same court can decide cases as a trial court and as a court of appeal as well. I do not see any persuasive arguments for reasonableness of said state and feel that three-level system is quite sufficient. Some caveats may be made on some high-value or high-complexity case categories, which might be heard in a court of appeal or in the Supreme Court as by a first instance (trial) court. Nevertheless, I am strongly committed to narrowness of court specialization, where each judge decides a comparatively specified category of cases.?????? ?

One more concern I would like to share is the presentation form of court decisions, the style of how the judgements are being written. Basically in the UK legal tradition, decision as a document has no requirements to a formalized structure, which is contingent and may vary from one to another. Perhaps it is an issue of habit or lack of professional eye, but it is indeed occasionally challenging to read a non-structured long legal document, and, what seems to be crucial, to comprehend a legal issue and a judge’s decision itself. It would be much easier for courts to deliver legal messages and express legal motives to lay public by implementing a judgment structure. For instance, court’s decision may consist of:

Introductive part (parties’ titles, brief gist of a dispute);

Descriptive part (dispute and parties’ arguments description, appearance before a court);

Motivational part (relevant legislation, legal assessment of facts, judge’s arrival at his decision);

Resolutive part (final and precise judge’s decision on the dispute subject).

For the end, I do not claim to express the truth of final instance, but share my thoughts and considerations with professional community only. If you would like to reflect, debate, or criticize, you are always welcomed!