Judicial Individuality on the UK Supreme Court (Hart Studies on Judging and the Courts)

This book presents an empirical analysis of the UK Supreme Court’s output over its first ten years, with a specific focus on each individual judge’s contribution to each case.It shows that judges, like all of us, are human; it would be difficult to imagine that any of us, even in our most professional capacity, could act completely independently of our predilections, motivations and biases.The same is true for the judges sitting on the UK’s highest court. Drawing on insights from a bespoke dataset of judgments, this work discerns trends and tendencies across each judge’s voting patterns and the reasoning they adopt when disposing of cases.It not only highlights areas of divergence, but also shows how each of the judges tended to vote in different contexts, including which were more likely to overturn appeals from lower courts, side with certain parties such as the state or underdogs, and find liability in various areas (tort, contract, criminal, EU, immigration and tax law, with a spec