HH Judge Simon Brown QC reflects on Mitchell’s eruption in civil justice & its aftershocks
Civil Justice is surprisingly volcanic: it violently erupts periodically into reform and then subsides for the next 20 years or so until the next build up of pressure caused by delay and excessive cost.
1990s
The last previous major eruption was in the 1990’s which produced the new civil justice landscape of CPR and the Arbitration Act 1996. Lord Woolf had recommended five big changes (ROCES) in 1994:
- Rules: a new book with simpler rules without procedural case law;
- Overriding objective: aiming at accessible justice for all at proportionate cost;
- Case management: taken over from the parties by the judges;
- Estimates: agreed by the parties or approved by the court; and
- Sanctions: for disobedience of rules and orders.
Each of these were effected by CPR five years later but not before a vigorous debate about “sanctions”:
- Professor Zuckerman wrote that “the proposed sanctions regime is likely to make little difference” and
