Judicial independence: Some evidence from the English Court of Appeal

This paper is concerned with the existence or otherwise of conscious politi cal interference with judicial decision taking. We produce new evidence fro m the English Court of Appeal to shed some light on the theoretical debate on judicial independence. This evidence rests on the fact that the procedur e for promoting judges from the Court of Appeal to the House of Lords is in principle under political control: the lord chancellor, who has a key role in the promotion of judges, is a member of the cabinet and as such a polit ical appointee. The data relate to public law decisions made by judges in t he Court of Appeal over the period 1951-86. We use a competing risks surviv al model to establish whether the record of individual judges in deciding f or or against the government was a factor that determined their promotion c hances, controlling for the quality of their decision making.