Research on the English Judicial Process

This article is an examination of the English judicial process as a subject of research. My perspective is that of a political scientist whose major field of interest has been American judicial politics. If my subject were the House of Commons or party politics in Britain, it would be appropriate to focus my examination upon an evaluation of the relevant political science literature. But political scientists thus far have virtually ignored the English courts as an object of study; the limited scholarship done on this set of institutions has been contributed chiefly by social scientists in other fields and by legal scholars. For this reason, my primary goal is not to assess the existing literature on the judicial process. Rather, I wish to communicate this literature to political scientists and to suggest directions that they might take in studying the judicial branch.