7. The Court of Justice of the European Union:

The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) is one of the key institutions in the European political system, and amongst the less well known. Described as one of the most powerful international courts, and perceived as one of the reasons the UK left the European Union (EU) (their main argument being that they did not want to be held to account by an unelected and non-British court), the Court continues to be shrouded in mystery. The aim of this chapter is to facilitate an understanding of the structure, history, and workings of this Court, as a key actor in the EU’s institutional system. As such, it is not only a judicial actor but a ‘political’ actor too. Its constitutional role, as well as its role during the economic and financial crisis, illustrates these multiple facets.

The Harcourts

The papers of the Second and Third Earls Harcourt have become available in the last five years. Among them are a substantial number of letters from the French branch of their family, whose head was the duc D’Harcourt. As leading office-holders at the British court, the Harcourts were close friends of the king and queen, and the Harcourts acted as a conduit for first-hand information from France, and this chapter will show that they greatly influenced the king’s views on the Revolution and the wars which followed. Throughout these years, George took a more ideological and intransigent view of these events than his prime minister Pitt, and their sources of information help to explain their differences.

FromJudge JudytoJudge RinderandJudge Geordie: humour, emotion and ‘televisual legal consciousness’

This paper attempts to counter legal studies’ common reading of court TV shows by starting with an understanding of themastelevision, rather comparing them to ‘real courts’. It analyses two recent examples of British court TV shows –Judge Rinder(ITV, 2014–) andJudge Geordie(MTV, 2015) – to draw out how the text'sformestablishes particular kinds of ‘televisual legal consciousness’.Judge Rinder’s daytime address and his camped authority allow a frame in which humour can disarm conflict and reveal wider political injustice.Judge Geordie’s irreverent upturning of the judged into judge draws upon the registers of youth reality television to privilege affect and emotion. In staging some of the tensions between law's masculine rationality and popular culture's feminine emotionality, these shows enact their interdependence. Such an analysis that includes attention to form, address and genre allows us a deeper exploration of the relationship between television, law and the everyday.

The Gurkhas and Great Inequalities in Their Lives

The Nepalese Gurkhas have been in military service for the British more than 200 years and played an important role not only in helping the British exert its control over its colonials or protectorates, but also in securing some countries or keeping the world peace. However, these Gurkhas have not enjoyed their rights because of their unique identity. Therefore, this paper begins with the history of the Gurkha regiment, the martial race theory as well as the racist ideas on the Gurkhas. Then it turns to the great inequalities that the Gurkhas have experienced during their military service and after their retirement as well as in law & British court. Finally, it briefly covers reasons for Gurkhas’ inequalities and ways to eliminate the inequalities.

Judicial Behavior and Devolution at the Privy Council

In this article, we study judicial behavior at the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council (JCPC). British judges in general, and British high court judges in particular, are perceived to be independent and isolated from political pressure and interference. Furthermore, these judges tend to show a particularly high rate of consensus. This has led many scholars to consider that, contrarily to what holds for several other courts around the world (such as the US Supreme Court), the attitudinal model does not find support when British higher court judges are considered. In this paper we assess whether similar conclusions might be drawn from the JCPC, another British court of last resort. We create a unique dataset to study empirically decisions of the JCPC and investigate the extent to which judges exhibit different judicial behavior depending on the type of appeal being brought to the court,

The East India Company’s Conquest of Assam, India, and “Community” Justice: Panchayats/Mels in Translation

The East India Company troops fighting the Burmese aggression on the frontier of Bengal in Eastern India “freed” upper and lower Assam territories in 1825. David Scott of the Bengal Service was appointed to oversee the establishment of civil and revenue administration in these frontier territories. He established a hierarchical multiple structure of “native courts”—called panchayats—as the chief medium of civil and criminal justice. This was ostensibly continuing a traditional Assamese form of dispute resolution—the mel; however, the British criminal jury as well as the expert assessor model animated the system. After his death in 1831, the system was brought in line with the rest of the Bengal administration based on the British court system. His experiment, paralleled in many other newly conquered and ceded districts from the Madras territories to Central India, suggests the use of this mode in post-conquest situations by British administrators in South Asia.

‘I felt a noble shock’: James Boswell in German Princely Courts

The article deals with James Boswell’s (1740–1795) attitudes towards the courtly milieu in the context of eighteenth-century British court discourse. The central argument is that, strongly contrary to the anti-court ethos of his intellectual and social milieu, Boswell had an affirmative and enthusiastic attitude towards the court. Moreover, the fact that he was neither an Addisonian moralist ‘spectator’ nor a cynical court aristocrat like Lord Chesterfield, but in many senses a highly affective ‘man of feeling’ of the age, did not diminish the uniqueness of his positive view of court culture. On the one hand, Boswell’s appreciation of the court was connected with his firm monarchism and belief in hereditary rank; on the other hand, he was aesthetically fascinated by the splendour and magnificence of the courtly milieu. His appraisal of the court did not include the common-sense moralism of the moral weeklies or the cynical observations of the aristocratic court discourse; rather his attitude was immediate, emotional, and enthusiastic in the spirit of the cult of sensibility.