Access to Justice: Legal Principle and Practical Reality
By Professor Mark Elliott Constitutional Law students discover early in their studies that the principle of access to justice is jealously guarded by courts. In a series of well-known cases, courts have demonstrated a strong commitment in this area, characterising access to justice as a common law constitutional right and backing this up through a willingness to read Acts of Parliament in strained — and, some would say, untenable — ways to ensure legislation does not trespass upon the right. Thus, in the Anisminic case, the Appellate Committee of the House of Lords famously held that a statutory provision which said that the determinations of a public body ‘shall not be called in question in any court’ did not prevent courts from ruling on the legality of such determinations. More recently, in the Privacy International case, the Supreme Court took a similarly robust approach to a similarly (and even more strongly) worded provision. Lord Carnwath went so far as to say that ‘it i