Chief Justice Woolf, the most senior judge in Britain, has tried to redrail government plans for democratic reform of the judicial system. He told a Cambridge University audience that creating a final court of outside the legislature would result in a “second class supreme court.” Woolf claimed that the separation of powers, widely regarded as essential in a liberal democracy, was undesirable. “Of course there have been times of tension” (between the executive and judiciary), he said, “but with good sense and good will on all sides they have been successfully managed. This was made easier not because of the separation of powers, but because of the absence of the separation of powers.”
Calling for legislation to create a supreme court and abolish the post of Lord Chancellor to be postponed, Woolf claimed that strong links between the judiciary and legislative branches of government were to be valued, citing “the dual role of the Law Lords as judges and parliamentarians and the unique position of the Lord Chancellor as a member of the executive and head of the judiciary.”
Woolf also stated that denying asylum seekers the right of appeal to the courts against an adverse appeal tribunal decision could be “the catalyst for a campaign for a written constitution.” Seeming to pose such a campaign as a threat, he said that the British could “take genuine pride” in their lack of a written constitution. “So far we have coped successfully without a written constitution” he claimed. “That we entered the 21st century without there being more of a clamour for our constitutional arrangements to be reduced into writing is a situation in which we can take genuine pride.”
Chief Justice Woolf is a
legislator-for-life as well as the most senior judge. He uses the feudal title of “Lord.”
Six of the so-called Law Lords who have expressed an opinion on the creation of a supreme court outside the legislature have opposed it. Four others, however, have described the reform as a “cardinal feature of a modern, liberal, democratic state governed by the rule of law.”