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Hale: 'eliminate risk'
The House of Lords practice of sitting in panels - rather than en banc - to hear cases could be affecting the outcome of decisions, the law lord Baroness Hale of Richmond admitted this week.


Baroness Hale said that it was easy to think of cases where 'the result would probably have been different if the panel had been different, although that raises interesting questions about how predictable the decision of any particular judge either is or should be'.



Giving the City Leaders lecture at London's City University last week, she said there was an argument for all the members of the UK's highest court to sit together at once, as is common practice among supreme courts elsewhere in the world. She said this 'eliminates the risk that the selection of the particular panel to hear the case may affect the result'.



Baroness Hale noted that judges are currently allocated to panels by the two senior law lords, and while there is no 'sinister intent', the choice of judges could affect the outcome.



However, Baroness Hale noted that sitting en banc would halve the number of cases that could be heard, adding it clearly increases the desire of politicians to 'fill the court with people of their own political persuasion. That does not happen here. Colleagues in the US are amazed that I do not know my colleagues' politics', she said.



Rachel Rothwell