7 - Judges

Summary

THE POWER OF APPOINTMENT

After the passage of the 1846 Act sixty judges were soon appointed, it being affirmed in R v. Parham that the Act did indeed envisage one judge per district, not one for each court. In the 1870s, following the Judicature Commissioners' recommendation for a drastic reduction in courts, the Lord Chancellor came under strong pressure to cut the number of judges substantially, but the reductions were modest and in 1914 there were still fifty-five judges. Little changed between the wars, judges being increased by two, but afterwards the statutory maximum was progressively raised, to sixty-five in 1949, thereafter by stages to ninety-seven in 1968 and in 1970, in preparation for the Beeching reforms, to 125. This doubling in twenty years of numbers which had been more or less static for a century was driven by necessity, for the LCD continued to oppose ‘dilution’ of the judiciary at all levels. Thus the 1955 expansion was directly linked to the coming of legal aid and a wider jurisdiction and that of 1968 to the acquisition of divorce and the increasing general workload. For the most part, a single judge continued to cover a district, though from 1959 he might call upon a ‘floater’ to cope with congestion. However, by 1963 there were nineteen districts, including all the London ones, with two judges and one, Marylebone, with three, and this trend continued through the decade.