David Sugarman 240 although the Privy Council acted as the final court of appeals for Britain and all her colonies: it had neither a regular Bench nor a regular Bar. Of the lawyers only the Master of the Rolls attended, assisted by an ex-ambassador or ‘nowand then a junior Lord of the Admiralty who was neither ambassador nor lawyer, but would be exceedingly fit for both functions only that he happened to be educated for neither’. Kindred criticism of the Privy Council endured well into the present century. The Dominions frequently complained that they were off” with a scratch court. The highest court of the Empire would reverse the decisions of Dominioncourts (four or five members strong) without preparing written judgments and usually with only three judges sitting. Indeed, it was continued dominion protests about the “old fogies” who sat in the Privy Council that led Lord Chancellor Cave to request the resignation of Lord Atkinson, the most senior LawLord.^'* It is said that Lord Halsbury would leave Privy Council hearings to attend Cabinet meetings, returning considerably later the same day to resume his judicial work.^^ His partisan approach to cases and judicial selection are notorious. Stevens’ history of the House of Lords - the highest court in England - argues that throughout the nineteenth and first decade of this century many LawLords did not viewthemselves as professional judges. During this period many high court appointments were political rather than based on their potential qualities as judges. “Not until the [19]30s” writes Stevens, “did the professional judges, led by Atkin, Wright and Macmillan, take control. being “fobbed V.- The Legal Professions The legal professions maintained many of their “pre-modern” and “irrational” features. Lor example, there is the persistent social and educational elitismof the bar. We know that the bar (and, therefore, the senior judges of England and the Empire) were recruited froman extremely narrow spectrumof society. The principal centres of recruitment throughout the nineteenth century were first and foremost London and the home counties. By the late eighteenth cencited in Rubinstein, op. cit., p. 68. See A. Paterson, [book review], British Journal of Law and Society, 7, 1980, pp. 310-17, p. 315. ^5 See ibid., p. 316, n. 15. See, R.F.V. Heuston, The Lives of the Lord Chancellors, 1885-1940, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964) and Paterson, op cit. pp. 315-6. R. Stevens, Law and Politics: the House of Lords as a Judicial Body 1800-1976, (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1979), p. 193. See D. Duman, The English and Colonial Bars in the l9th Century, (London: CroomHelm, 1983), chap. 12.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjYyNDk=