The court system of England & Wales

The Courts and Tribunals

https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/criminal-court-statistics
https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/family-court-statistics-quarterly
https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/civil-justice-statistics

The Ministry of Justice website maintains pages with links to recent and historical court statistics, mainly about the workload of the courts and tribunals systems. The annual statistics should suffice for most research. Annual statistics are normally in the April-June edition. Statistics up to 2014 can be found at https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/court-statistics-quarterly

The Ministry of Justice’s website (http://www.justice.gov.uk/) provides links to illuminating publications and research (https://www.gov.uk/government/publications?departments%5B%5D=ministry-of-justice), for instance, Are Juries Fair? (Cheryl Thomas) mentioned at 3.3.1.
(https://www.justice.gov.uk/downloads/publications/research-and-analysis/moj-research/are-juries-fair-research.pdf).

The main website (http://www.justice.gov.uk/) provides information about court procedure among many other issues. The Civil Procedure Rules are at http://www.justice.gov.uk/courts/procedure-rules/civil, the Criminal Procedure Rules are at http://www.justice.gov.uk/courts/procedure-rules/criminal, and the Family Procedure Rules are at http://www.justice.gov.uk/courts/procedure-rules/family.

The UK Supreme Court maintains its own website: https://www.supremecourt.uk/, with information for lawyers, litigants, students and public.

The Privy Council’s website is https://www.jcpc.uk/.

Information about the ECJ and ECHR respectively is accessible https://europa.eu/european-union/about-eu/institutions-bodies_en and http://www.echr.coe.int/.

The Crown Prosecution Service

http://www.cps.gov.uk/
The Crown Prosecution website provides information for lawyers, victims, witnesses, etc. and includes the CPS Code, and news. Their Annual Report, as well as giving information about the CPS itself, gives statistics about its caseload.

Judicial Inquiries

http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/webarchive/public-inquiries-inquests.htm
The National Archives provides resources relating to public inquiries, including links to transcripts.

Some recent inquiries need to be researched separately, e.g. The Chilcott Inquiry at http://www.iraqinquiry.org.uk/, the Leveson Inquiry at: http://www.levesoninquiry.org.uk/, and the Bloody Sunday Inquiry at: http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20101103103930/http:/report.bloody-sunday-inquiry.org/

Justice Reforms

Access to Justice:
http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/+/http:/www.dca.gov.uk/civil/final/index.htm
Lord Woolf’s Access to Justice Report of 1996. This is still valuable reading for anyone interested in the ethos of the reform of court procedure.

The Jackson Reforms:
http://www.justice.gov.uk/civil-justice-reforms
The Jackson Reforms of 2013 are part of a wider movement towards further reform of access to justice

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