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2018 | OriginalPaper | Buchkapitel

Roots of the Resistance to the Change in the Supreme Court’s Role

verfasst von : Marko Bratković

Erschienen in: Transformation of Civil Justice

Verlag: Springer International Publishing

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Abstract

In recent years, a paradigm shift in the supreme court’s role from a private to a public purpose has been recognised in many jurisdictions. Due to growing backlogs at supreme courts in many countries, the private purpose of the just and correct resolution of every individual case has given place to a public purpose consisting in safeguarding and promoting the public interest of ensuring uniformity of case law, the development of the law, and offering guidance to lower courts. However, this paradigm shift has met with considerable criticism from a large part of the legal community. It has been argued that litigants will become exposed to judicial arbitrariness and that more restrictive access to the supreme court means less protection of equality before the law. In order to explore the possible roots of the resistance to the change in the supreme court’s role, Faulkner’s polyperspective technique of narration used in the novel The Sound and the Fury might be of some help. The retelling of more or less the same story from the perspective of the individual party, the attorney-at-law, the supreme court and the constitutional court reveals that in favouring the public interest of uniform application of the law some particular interests of all involved have to be suppressed, and the broader picture taken into account.

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Vorheriges Kapitel Safeguarding the Right to an Impartial Tribunal by Means of Challenging the Judge

Nächstes Kapitel Transformation of the Cassation Model in France, The Netherlands and Belgium: Piercing the Legalistic Veil

See, e.g., for the Czech Republic, Bobek (2009); for German-speaking countries, Domej (2014); for Chile, Bravo-Hurtado (2014); for Slovenia (and Croatia), Galič (2014a, 2014b, 2014c) and Uzelac and Galič (2017); for Spain, de Benito (2017); for Belgium, Van der Haegen (2018) (in this volume).

Lord Chief Justice Hewart was the originator (paraphrased here) of the aphorism, “Justice should not only be done, but should manifestly and undoubtedly be seen to be done”; R v. Sussex Justices, Ex parte McCarthy ([1924] 1 KB 256, [1923] All ER Rep 233).

Conversely, in the common law countries, where the normal assumption is that the first word is also the last word, the right even of a first appeal has never been accepted as fundamental (Jolowicz 2000, 349).

See, e.g., Anghel v. Italy, No. 5968/09, § 50, 25 June 2013.

See, e.g., Delcourt v. Belgium, 17 January 1970, §§ 25, 26, Series A No. 11; Tolstoy Miloslavsky v. the United Kingdom, 13 July 1995, § 59, Series A No. 316-B; Eliazer v. the Netherlands, No. 38055/97, § 31, ECHR 2001-X.

This is to be contrasted with the Supreme Court of the UK, which seems likely to hear c. 60 appeals a year, most of them in non-criminal matters (Andrews 2017, 41).

Rodin (2005, 7, 8) explains that the predominant discourse in Central and Eastern Europe was (and still is) authoritarian. The main characteristic of such discourse is the proclamation and imposition of one truth as universal and final. In this mode of legal thinking, judges are seen as agents mechanically applying legal texts to facts (bouche de la loi or Subsumptionsautomat) (Kühn 2011, 199–226; Mańko 2013a, 6).

Conversely, the rule iura novit curia has never been and is not part of English law (Jolowicz 1980, 84). Anglo-American judges, for instance, draw heavily upon the parties’ competing arguments as to what the correct statement of law is (Kühn 2006, 21). Cf. Damaška (1986, 139).

Curiously, communist legal systems claimed that no party should gain an advantage from having a better lawyer (Kühn 2006, 22).

In Germany, France and Belgium, for instance, in order to have access to the supreme court, the party needs to hire a specialised attorney.

In that regard one has to be careful not to extend the factual and legal situations of another case if the cases do not really match (Galič 2017, 28).

The identification of constitutional matters, however, can be difficult especially in relation to the right to a fair trial, since almost any procedural violation by the ordinary courts could be seen as a violation of the right to a fair trial (Galič 2014a, 22).

See Galič (2014b, 167, 168).

While it is true that the European Court of Human Right has acknowledged that the supreme court is not required to give reasons for a decision not to grant permission to appeal, it nevertheless recently suggested on a couple of occasions (Nersesyan v. Armenia, No. 15371/07, § 25, 19 January 2010; Wnuk v. Poland, No. 38308/05, § 1c, 1 September 2009) that such a solution is not the preferred one (Galič 2014c, 307).

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Titel: Roots of the Resistance to the Change in the Supreme Court’s Role
verfasst von: Marko Bratković
Verlag: Springer International Publishing
Buch: Transformation of Civil Justice
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-97357-9

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-319-97358-6

Copyright-Jahr: 2018
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97358-6_18