Abstract
This book on the criminal justice system is uniquely positioned to examine judicial claims to independence, the politics of the judiciary, the rule of law, and the role of the executive in the context of a democratic polity. The authors have mined the British government’s archival vaults to assemble records including official (previously classified) Home Office files and present a ground-breaking narrative. By tracking the relationship between senior judges and the Home Office from the end of the nineteenth century to the modern day, revelations concerning the politics of the judiciary and the separation of powers are unearthed. The book argues that the claims of the senior judiciary to be independent of the executive are invalidated by historical records and the theory and practice of the separation of powers (the ‘Westminster Model’) deeply flawed. Rather, at every material point, civil servants compromised the role of the senior judiciary’s decision-making. Moreover, with the passive endorsement of senior judges, the executive repeatedly misled Parliament as to the authorship and provenance of fundamental rules governing the relationship of the individual to the state in relation to police powers of arrest, detention, and questioning. The book also explores the past and continuing impact of all this to former colonial territories and traces the close liaison between key members of the senior judiciary and the state in reconfiguring the modern criminal process in a way which weakens defence lawyers, pressurizes defendants into pleading guilty, and undermines cardinal adversarial protections.
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