The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (140 page)

 
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The body of judges in a country. Four main issues concerning them commonly arise in political discussion.

(1) 
Judicial independence
. It is generally thought important for the rule of law that judges should not be dismissable at the immediate wish of the executive or the legislature. This is typically guaranteed in constitutions. For instance, the US Constitution, in Article III: 1, lays down that ‘The Judges, both of the supreme and inferior courts, shall hold their offices during good Behaviour, and shall, at stated Times, receive for their Services, a Compensation, which shall not be diminished during their Continuance in Office’. Similar arrangements are secured in Britain by charging judges' salaries to a fund which is not reviewable by Parliament. This leaves politicians with considerable control over the appointment of judges. Notoriously, American Presidents try to appoint Supreme Court justices who they think will support their politics; equally notoriously, they are often disappointed. President Eisenhower is said to have called his appointment of Chief Justice Earl Warren ‘the biggest damfool mistake I ever made’. ( See also
civil rights
; judicial activism.)
(2)  Judicial review of legislation. Written constitutions give the power to review the constitutionality of laws to the regular courts, to special constitutional courts, or in France, to the
Conseil Constitutionnel
. By contrast, the British doctrine of
parliamentary sovereignty
gives judges no power to review the constitutionality of laws, only the power to declare what they really mean. In some cases, as in a Court of Appeal ruling on the powers and duties of the
Boundary Commission
in 1983, this may turn out to be quite different from what Parliament intended them to mean.
(3) 
Judicial review of executive actions
. Because the US Constitution gives Congress the power ‘to regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes’, the courts were drawn early on into the regulation of executive acts and agencies dealing with interstate commerce. Most judicial systems, in this case including the British, have a similar power ( see also administrative law). It is now common for aggrieved parties to ask for judicial review of executive actions in Britain. The European Court of Human Rights may also rule against actions of the executive in the United Kingdom.
(4) 
Their social origins
. Especially in Britain, the case against giving more independence to the judiciary is generally based on an argument that they are drawn from a narrow social stratum and cannot be expected to give a fair hearing to the poor or to ethnic minorities; and/or that they are biased in favour of individualism against collectivism. That they are drawn from a narrow social stratum is undeniable, especially in Britain where judges may only be recruited from the ranks of barristers (advocates) and where the recruitment of barristers is peculiar even by British standards. But it has never been satisfactorily shown that they are systematically biased in the ways suggested.

 
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This Spanish word meaning ‘council’ referred in the sixteenth century to government consultative committees. In modern usage it refers to a military council that rules a country following a
coup d'état
, before constitutional rule is restored. In Latin America juntas are normally formed by the chiefs of the army, air force, and navy.
RG 

 
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The science of law. More specifically, jurists are concerned to produce a systematic understanding of the nature of law, and its development, to expound the principles upon which it is, or should be, organized, including its relationship to other institutions and practices, like morality, and to elucidate its internal practices. ‘Law’ may be positive law, natural law (hence the important tradition of ‘natural jurisprudence’), or even a regulatory code not part of a formal legal system. The abstract nature of these concerns might appear to distance jurisprudence from the content of law, but the principles it explores or adumbrates are those which do or could form part of the practice of lawyers or are those applied, or capable of being applied, within the legal system. Hence the relationship between law and jurisprudence is akin to that between
politics
and
political theory
.
AR 

 
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A body of people charged with deciding the truth of some claim. In democratic Athens, juries had 501, 1001, or 1501 members (an odd number to avoid tied votes). Then as now, jurors were selected randomly (at least in principle). The idea that it is fair that the guilt or innocence of the accused should be decided by a jury selected at random from his or her fellow-citizens was formalized by
Condorcet
, whose work is now called the ‘jury theorem’. This states that if each juror is on average more likely to judge correctly than wrongly whether the accused is guilty, then the verdict of the majority will be trustworthy. In particular, each juror need be only just more likely to be right than wrong for a majority of, say, 10 to 2 to be sufficient to conclude that the majority is correct. The jury theorem is again being studied and applied in politics and other social sciences.

 
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