Jurisdiction, Practice and Procedure of the Court of Appeal

Extract

I have been invited to talk to you tonight about the Court of Appeal in England, its jurisdiction, procedure and practice, and the first point I would make is that, as was recently emphasised by Mr. Justice Romer, there is no such thing as an inherent right of appeal to the Court of Appeal. That court is a creation of statute and its jurisdiction is limited to that conferred on it by statute. As we now know it, it has power ‘to give any judgment and make any order which ought to have been made and to make such further or other order as the nature of the case may require’. One hundred years ago there was no court which had such wide jurisdiction. Indeed, there was, strictly speaking, no Court of Appeal at all.