Appellate Recruitment Patterns in the Higher British Judiciary: 1850 - 1990 Page: 1
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CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION
It has been said that these days any Tom, Dick, or Harry can be an appellate judge
in England, at least if the "Tom, Dick, or Harry" are: Senior Law Lord Thomas Henry
Bingham, Law Lord Richard Rashleigh Folliott Scott, and Lord Chief Justice Harry
Wolfe. Since 1850, fewer than three hundred individuals -- all but five of them men --
can claim the distinction of having been appointed to an appellate bench in the English
senior judiciary. These individuals are the creme de la creme, the elite of the elite in the
English legal system. It is the purpose of this dissertation to explore the path of judicial
recruitment to the senior appellate courts of England, and help explain why these
particular individuals reached the courts that make the law that governs England and has
influenced common law legal systems throughout the Western world.
Specifically, my intent is to expand and extend the work of Tate (1992, 1975) in
this field. I do this by significantly expanding the database of personal attribute
information collected on the British senior judiciary, and greatly reducing measurement
error in what has previously been collected. I can therefore describe the personal
attributes of members of the English senior judiciary to an unprecedented degree, and can
better demonstrate how those attributes have changed over the past century and a half. I
also test Tate's model of appellate recruitment using the augmented and expanded
database to determine whether it operates as originally thought. It is the thesis of this
paper that family status, previously asserted as a major factor in explaining judicial
promotion to the appellate bench, while important, is less helpful in explaining promotion
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Thomas, Bruce K. Appellate Recruitment Patterns in the Higher British Judiciary: 1850 - 1990, dissertation, December 2004; Denton, Texas. (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc4650/m1/10/: accessed April 18, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; .