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The Appointment of Judges by Ministers

Political Preferment in England, 1880–2005

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 October 2022

Chris Hanretty
Chris Hanretty*
Affiliation:
University of East Anglia
*
Contact the author at [email protected].
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Abstract

I investigate appointment to the Court of Appeal and House of Lords between 1880 and 2005. Exploiting the fact that appointment is almost invariably from within the ranks of existing High Court judges and using a conditional logit model, I test for effects of legal, professional, and political factors on appointment prospects. Although there is no advantage to having the same political affiliation as the appointing lord chancellor, judges are more likely to be promoted if they were previously appointed by the incumbent party.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Law and Courts , Volume 3 , Issue 2 , Fall 2015 , pp. 305 - 329
Copyright
© 2015 by the Law and Courts Organized Section of the American Political Science Association. All rights reserved.

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Footnotes

The author would like to thank Bruce K. Thomas for generously sharing his data, Clare Leaver for discussions on modeling strategies, and the reviewers of this journal for their extremely helpful comments.

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