Book in progress- An empirical study of judicial case management in the crown court.

This book will be based on my thesis. It is aimed at legal professionals, academics, students and policy makers. I provide an introductory summary of the book.

The book starts with a history of adversarial trial proceedings and the role judges played in them. Following this it describes and explores the political conditions in which reforms to adversarial crown court proceedings have been made. Since the 1980s successive English and Welsh governments have been concerned with the rising costs of criminal litigation. As a consequence, from 1995, judges in the Crown Court have been required to act as case managers who control the timing of cases and monitor statutory compliance of defence statements. To implement these policies pre-trial hearings were introduced which, from 2005, became known as Plea and Case Management Hearings (PCMHs). In the same year the new judicial responsibilities were strengthened by the Criminal Procedure Rules, creating a duty on judges to actively manage cases and providing them with a set of powers to do so.Although judicial case management at PCMHs has become an essential aspect of crown court trial procedure there is little empirical research which informs us on its nature. Indeed the topic hardly sparked any critical scholarly assessment or debate. This book seeks to address those gaps in the literature. Drawing on 202 transcripts generated from observations of PCMHs in one crown court centre, field notes, and informal conversations with legal practitioners, it examines how judges implement the case management requirements and identifies three distinct judicial approaches: non-interventionist, problem-solving and policy implementing. The latter approach implies that the judge is in absolute control over the timing of cases. Only one judge out of ten consistently employed this approach. The book identifies the reasons for it and argues that there are several constraints on the willingness and the ability of judges to exercise controls over the timing of cases. These include the conditions in which they work, their relationships with lawyers within the local legal culture, and conflicting expectations of their role. The thesis also reveals how some judges successfully implement case management policies. It exposes judicial strategies used to accelerate case processing and techniques to enforce compliance of defence statements. Based on my empirical findings it further offers a critical assessment of the impact of judicial case management on the traditional role of the judge and the position of the defendant in the adversarial trial process.

Later this year I will go back to the court to see whether the approaches I identified three years earlier in my study are still employed by the judges. I also intend to do some interviews with the judges previously observed.