BLS LLB 5 Years Sem 3 History of Courts 2025-26 - ATKT 75/25 Question Paper with Solutions

The East India Company established its first factory in India at Surat, in 1613, in the reign of the Mughal emperor Jahangir, after Captain Thomas Best's naval success against the Portuguese at Swally and the farman which followed. Sir Thomas Roe's embassy of 1615 to 1619 confirmed and extended the privileges.

At Surat the Company's establishment was headed by a President and Council, and it is from that body, exercising authority over the Company's servants under the Charter of 1600, that the Company's judicial administration in India begins.

Under section 24A of the Advocates Act, 1961, a person is disqualified from being admitted as an advocate on a State roll if he:

1. is convicted of an offence involving moral turpitude;
2. is convicted of an offence under the Untouchability (Offences) Act, 1955; or
3. is dismissed or removed from employment or office under the State on a charge involving moral turpitude.

The disqualification ceases after two years from his release or from the dismissal or removal, as the case may be.

Under Article 216 of the Constitution, every High Court consists of a Chief Justice and such other judges as the President may from time to time deem it necessary to appoint.

The Constitution therefore fixes no maximum. The strength of each High Court is settled by the President, that is by the Union Government, by order, on the recommendation of the Chief Justice of the High Court concerned, in consultation with the State Government and with the Chief Justice of India, and it is reviewed periodically according to the institution and disposal of cases.

Article 141 provides that the law declared by the Supreme Court shall be binding on all courts within the territory of India.

Its significance is that it makes the Supreme Court's decisions a source of law, gives the doctrine of precedent constitutional force in India, and secures uniformity and certainty by ensuring that every court in the country, including every High Court, applies the same rule on the same point.

In the United States

Adopted rigidly: legislative power in Congress, executive in the President, judicial in the courts; the President is not a member of Congress; and each organ checks the others through the veto, impeachment, Senate confirmation of appointments, and judicial review.

In India

Followed in substance but not in rigid form.

Observed in:

1. Article 50, directing the State to separate the judiciary from the executive in the public services.
2. Articles 121 and 211, barring discussion of a judge's conduct in the legislatures.
3. Articles 122 and 212, barring the courts from inquiring into legislative proceedings.
4. The security of tenure and salary of judges (Articles 124, 125, 217, 221).
5. The division of judicial and executive magistrates by the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1973.

Departed from:

1. Ministers must be members of a House (Article 75(5)).

What law reporting is

Law reporting is the systematic recording and publication of the decisions of the courts, with the facts, the arguments, and above all the reasons for the decision, so that the principle laid down can be found and applied afterwards.

The advantages

1. It makes the doctrine of precedent workable. Under Article 141 the law declared by the Supreme Court binds all courts, and stare decisis requires a court to follow earlier decisions. Neither is possible unless the earlier decision has been accurately recorded and published. Reporting is the machinery of precedent.
2. Certainty of the law. A lawyer can advise a client, and a citizen can order his affairs, only if the law as the courts apply it can be found. Reports convert judicial decisions from private events into public law.
3. Uniformity. Reports allow a court in one part of the country to decide a point the same way as a court in another, which is how a single legal system is maintained across many courts.

Law reporting in India

Private and unofficial reports circulated in the nineteenth century, often inaccurate and conflicting. The Indian Law Reports Act, 1875 made reporting official: the High Courts' judgments were to be published in an authorised series, the Indian Law Reports, and the Act provided that no court should be bound to hear cited, as an authority, any report of a High Court decision other than one published under the authority of the Government. Today the Supreme Court's decisions are published in the Supreme Court Reports, alongside recognised private series.

7. To organise legal aid to the poor in the prescribed manner.
8. To manage and invest the funds of the Bar Council.
9. To provide for the election of its members.
10. To visit and inspect universities in accordance with the directions given by the Bar Council of India.

Committees

Disciplinary Committee (section 9), of three members, two elected from the Council and one co-opted advocate of not less than ten years' standing; Legal Aid Committee (section 9A); Executive Committee and Enrolment Committee (section 10).

What it was

The Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, sitting in London, was the final court of appeal for India from 1726 until 1949, and for the British Empire generally.

How Indian appeals reached it

The Charter of 1726 first gave an appeal to the King-in-Council, from the Governor-in-Council, where the sum exceeded 1,000 pagodas. The Act of Settlement, 1781 allowed appeals from the Sadar Diwani Adalat. The Committee was constituted as a formal court by the Judicial Committee Act, 1833, at Lord Brougham's instance, and by the Appellate Jurisdiction Act, 1908 it was to include Indian members. Its decision was in form advice to the Crown, which is why it gave a single opinion and, until 1966, permitted no dissent.

Its significance

1. It gave India the doctrine of precedent. Its decisions bound all Indian courts, and through it stare decisis and the citation of authority became the method of Indian law.

2. Its judges had no direct knowledge of Indian conditions, and some decisions are criticised for freezing custom into rigid rules.
3. It was a foreign court administering the law of a country in which it did not sit, which became politically intolerable as self-government approached.

Abolition

The Federal Court (1937) took part of its work; the Federal Court (Enlargement of Jurisdiction) Act, 1947 transferred its civil appellate jurisdiction; the Abolition of Privy Council Jurisdiction Act, 1949 ended the appeal; and the Supreme Court of India, constituted 28 January 1950, succeeded to it.

In this situation, if the Supreme Court finds the original "trial" by the Kazi to be illegal, what happens to the subsequent seizure of property? b.

What legal remedy (damages) was awarded to Naderah Begum?

1. The seizure becomes a trespass. An act done under a void order is done without lawful authority. The officers are therefore in the position of persons who entered the house, dispossessed the widow and carried away goods with no authority at all, and that is trespass to land and to goods and, as she pleaded it, assault, battery and false imprisonment.
2. The officers are personally liable. They cannot plead the Council's order as a defence, because the order was itself made on their own defective proceeding. The immunity of an officer extends only to acts within his lawful authority; an act outside it is his own. This is the principle which the Supreme Court applied, and it is why the defendants, and not the Council as an institution, were made to answer.

The consequences

The judgment provoked the Governor-General in Council, brought the country courts to a standstill because no law officer could act while liable to be sued, was laid before a Select Committee of the House of Commons, and produced the Act of Settlement, 1781, which protected the judicial officers of the country courts for acts done in their judicial capacity, exempted the Governor-General and Council for official acts, excluded revenue matters, and directed the application of Hindu and Muslim personal law.

The case

Kamaluddin Ali Khan was a revenue farmer, holding a farm as ostensible holder on behalf of Kanta Babu. On arrears of revenue being found due, the Calcutta Revenue Council ordered his committal to prison without bail. He obtained a writ of habeas corpus from the Supreme Court, which held the Council's return defective and admitted him to bail, laying down that in cases of disputed accounts a person must be bailed until the enquiry into his obligation is complete, and that an ostensible holder is not to be imprisoned until the under-renter has been called on and proved insolvent.

(a) How the Chief Justice should view the second arrest

I would view the re-arrest as unlawful, and as a contempt of the Court's order, for the following reasons:

1. The order of bail operates on the cause, not merely on the warrant. The Court did not release Kamaluddin because of a defect peculiar to the first warrant; it held that he was not liable to imprisonment at all while the account was disputed and the principal had not been pursued. A second arrest on the same cause therefore does exactly what the Court has held may not be done, and the change of warrant is a matter of form.

4. The purpose alleged does not enlarge the power. That the arrest protects the Company's financial interests goes to motive, not to authority. A good object cannot validate an act done without power, and this Court cannot inquire whether the imprisonment of a particular man is financially convenient.
5. The liberty of the subject is a matter for the courts. Where a man's freedom is in question, the legality of his detention is justiciable, and the return to the writ must state facts which in law justify the detention. A return that pleads necessity rather than authority is defective.

I would therefore issue the writ again, discharge or bail him, and, if the Council persisted, treat the re-arrest as a defiance of the Court's process.

(b) Does the executive power to collect revenue override habeas corpus?

In principle, no; in the event, Parliament made it so.

The modern position is the opposite. Under Articles 32 and 226 the legality of any detention is examinable, personal liberty is protected by Article 21, and no executive necessity places a detention beyond the reach of the writ. ADM Jabalpur v. Shivkant Shukla (1976), which came closest to the Council's argument by holding the remedy suspended during the Emergency, was condemned from the day it was delivered and was expressly overruled in K. S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India (2017).

The case in brief

Maharaja Nandkumar, a Brahmin of high rank, in March 1775 charged Warren Hastings before the Council with taking bribes. Shortly afterwards he was prosecuted, first for conspiracy and then, at the instance of Mohan Prasad, indicted for forgery of a bond alleged to have been made in 1770. He was tried in the Supreme Court before Chief Justice Sir Elijah Impey and the puisne judges with an English jury, convicted under the English forgery statute which made the offence a capital felony, sentenced to death, and hanged on 5 August 1775 after his petitions for leave to appeal and for a reprieve were refused.

(a) Why the refusal of a stay made it a "judicial murder"

1. The refusal made an arguable error irreversible. The legal questions raised were substantial and novel: whether an English statute creating a capital felony extended to Bengal at all, whether it could apply to an act done in 1770, four years before the Court existed, and whether an Indian could be hanged for an offence that was not capital under the law he lived by. Those questions could have been decided by the King-in-Council. Refusing the reprieve meant they would be decided after the man was dead, when no answer could help him.

For these reasons Indian legal historians describe the case as a judicial murder, that is a killing carried through the forms of law: the procedure was regular, and the result was a death that the law, properly examined, may not have warranted.

(b) The relationship between Impey and Hastings

The facts. Impey and Hastings were schoolfellows at Westminster and lifelong friends. Hastings, as Governor-General, afterwards appointed Impey to preside over the Sadar Diwani Adalat in 1780 with a salary, an appointment for which Impey was recalled to England and impeached, though he was acquitted.

The legal implications.

1. The rule against bias. Nemo judex in causa sua: no man may be a judge in his own cause, and the rule extends to any interest or connection that might affect impartiality. Nandkumar was the accuser of the judge's closest friend, and the prosecution followed the accusation.

The defence, stated fairly. Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, in The Story of Nuncomar and the Impeachment of Elijah Impey (1885), argued that the evidence of forgery was strong, the trial regular by the standards of the day, and the verdict the jury's rather than the judge's. That defence answers the charge of a rigged trial; it does not answer the charge of sitting at all in a case brought against his friend's accuser, nor the refusal of the reprieve.

Conclusion. Whatever the state of the evidence, the trial failed the test by which fairness is measured: a judge who should not have sat, sat; and having sat, closed the only avenue by which his own decision could have been reviewed.

The case

This is the Cossijurah Case (1779 to 1780), the climax of the conflict between the Supreme Court and the Supreme Council. Cossinath Baboo sued Raja Sundernarayan, zamindar of Cossijurah, in the Supreme Court, alleging that the Raja was within its jurisdiction as a person employed by the Company in the collection of revenue. The Court issued process. The Governor-General and Council, on the Advocate-General's opinion, issued a general notification to all zamindars that they were not subject to the Court unless actually employed by the Company or having submitted to it, and directed the Raja not to appear. The Raja hid; the Court's Sheriff went with an armed party to arrest him; the Council sent sepoys, who seized the Sheriff and his men and released the Raja. The Court then entertained an action against the Governor-General and Council personally, and they refused to appear.

(a) The grounds on which the Council justified the use of force

4. That the peace of the country and the collection of the revenue were at stake. The Court's claim, if allowed, would subject the whole native population of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa to English law and English process, which had never been intended and would make the government of the country impossible. Alarm had already spread among the zamindars, on whom the revenue depended.
5. That the Raja's house and a place of worship had been violated in the Sheriff's search, which the Council treated as an outrage requiring immediate intervention.

(b) What the use of force shows about the Court's limitations

1. The Court had no force of its own. Its authority was exercised through a Sheriff and a handful of officers; the army was under the Governor-General and Council. A court whose process can be stopped by the executive it is trying to control is powerless the moment the executive decides not to obey, and this is the plainest illustration of it in Indian legal history.

2. The Mayor's Court of 1726

The Company petitioned the Crown for courts whose decrees would be recognised in England, and George I granted the Charter of 1726.

Constitution. A Mayor's Court in each of the three Presidency towns, consisting of a Mayor and nine Aldermen; the quorum was the Mayor or senior Alderman with two Aldermen; seven of the nine Aldermen had to be natural-born British subjects. The Mayor was elected annually by the Aldermen; the Aldermen held office for life or until removed, and filled their own vacancies.

Character. These were Crown courts, established by royal charter. Their decrees were the King's, recognised in England and appealable to the King-in-Council.

Jurisdiction. All civil suits arising within the Presidency town and its subordinate factories; testamentary and probate jurisdiction with power to grant letters of administration. Criminal jurisdiction was given not to the Mayor's Court but to the Governor and Council as Justices of the Peace, holding Quarter Sessions.

Appeals. To the Governor-in-Council, and thence to the King-in-Council where the sum exceeded 1,000 pagodas.

1. Two authorities with overlapping claims. The Mayor's Court held a royal charter and considered itself the King's court, independent of the Company; the Governor-in-Council was the Company's government and also the appellate court from it.
2. The Governor-in-Council's triple role: executive government, appellate court, and, as Justices of the Peace, the criminal court.
3. The Aldermen's tenure. They held office for life and filled their own vacancies, so they were independent of the Governor, who deeply resented it.
4. Jurisdiction over Indians, especially in matters of caste and religion, where the Court applied English law to disputes the Governor thought it should not touch.

The instances.

1. At Madras, the Court and the Governor quarrelled over its claim to try suits between Indians touching caste and religious usage, and over the Governor's interference with its process.
2. At Bombay, the same conflict arose in its sharpest form, over the jurisdiction of the Mayor's Court over natives in matters concerning their caste and religion, the Governor-in-Council maintaining that such disputes belonged to the parties' own communities.

3. A Court of Requests was established for small causes up to 20 pagodas, cheap and summary.
4. The Mayor's Court became in substance a Company court, subordinate to the Governor-in-Council.

6. Assessment

Achievements. The Mayor's Courts introduced English law and judicial procedure into India; established the appeal to the King-in-Council, which endured until 1949; created courts of record with regular procedure; and gave the Presidency towns their first settled civil justice.

Failures. The judges were not lawyers; the Court was not independent of the executive; a foreign law was applied to an Indian population; and jurisdiction over Indians in personal matters was a standing grievance. The Charter of 1753 ended the conflict by subordinating the judiciary, a solution in the wrong direction, and the defect was repaired only by the Supreme Court of 1774, an independent Crown court staffed by professional barristers.

1. Supremacy of law, or absence of arbitrary power. No man may be punished except for a distinct breach of law established in the ordinary manner before the ordinary courts. Wide discretionary authority in the hands of government is the negation of the Rule of Law.
2. Equality before the law. Every man, whatever his rank or condition, is subject to the ordinary law and amenable to the jurisdiction of the ordinary tribunals. No official is exempt from the law that governs the citizen.
3. The constitution is the result of the ordinary law of the land. In England the general principles of the constitution, such as the right to personal liberty, are the result of judicial decisions in cases brought by private persons, not of a written guarantee.

3. Criticism of Dicey

1. He misunderstood the French droit administratif, treating separate administrative courts as a denial of equality when in fact they often gave the citizen a better remedy against the State.
2. Discretion is unavoidable in a modern welfare State; the question is not whether officials have discretion but whether it is guided, reviewable and exercised for the purpose given.

Constitutional foundations: the Preamble (justice, liberty, equality); Article 13, voiding laws inconsistent with Fundamental Rights; Article 14; Article 21, that no person shall be deprived of life or personal liberty except according to procedure established by law, read after Maneka Gandhi to require the procedure to be fair, just and reasonable; Articles 32 and 226, the writ remedies; and Article 50, separation of the judiciary from the executive.

5. Impact on the Indian judicial system

1. Judicial review. The courts may declare void any law or executive act inconsistent with the Constitution. This is the Rule of Law's principal machinery, and it is why the judiciary occupies the position it does in India.
2. The Rule of Law is part of the basic structure. In Kesavananda Bharati v. State of Kerala (1973) the basic structure doctrine was laid down, and in Indira Nehru Gandhi v. Raj Narain (1975) the Supreme Court struck down the Thirty-ninth Amendment so far as it placed the Prime Minister's election beyond judicial scrutiny, holding that the Rule of Law and free elections are part of the basic structure. Not even a constitutional amendment may abrogate it.

7. Access to justice. Locus standi was relaxed to permit public interest litigation, so that the Rule of Law is available to those who cannot come to court themselves. Article 39A and the Legal Services Authorities Act, 1987 provide legal aid.
8. Control of the executive through the writs. Articles 32 and 226 give every citizen a direct remedy against unlawful official action, which is the point at which the doctrine becomes usable by an individual.
9. The low point, and its correction. In ADM Jabalpur v. Shivkant Shukla (1976) the majority held that during the Emergency no person could move any court for habeas corpus, which was in substance a denial of the Rule of Law. Justice H. R. Khanna's dissent, that the State has no power to deprive a person of life or liberty without the authority of law even in an emergency, was vindicated: the Forty-fourth Amendment, 1978 provided that Articles 20 and 21 cannot be suspended even during an emergency, and the majority decision was expressly overruled in K. S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India (2017).

7. Assessment

The Rule of Law in India is stronger in one respect and weaker in another than Dicey's version. It is stronger because it rests on a written Constitution with enforceable Fundamental Rights, a basic structure that limits even the amending power, and a judiciary with the power to strike down legislation, none of which Dicey's England had. It is weaker in practice because of delay, since a remedy that takes fifteen years is not a remedy, because of arrears and vacancies in the courts, and because access to justice remains unequal. The doctrine is secure as law; its working depends on the administration of justice being made quick and affordable.

2. The recommendations

The All India Bar Committee (1953) under Justice S. R. Das recommended a unified Bar for the whole of India, a common roll, an all-India Bar Council with State Bar Councils, and the abolition of the different classes of practitioner. The Fourteenth Report of the Law Commission (1958) on the Reform of Judicial Administration made the same recommendations and added proposals on legal education. The Act gave effect to both and repealed the Acts of 1879 and 1926.

3. The objectives

1. To amend and consolidate the law relating to legal practitioners.
2. To create one class of practitioner, the advocate, and so a unified Bar.
3. To constitute State Bar Councils and an all-India Bar Council.
4. To provide a common roll and a right of practice throughout India.
5. To vest the discipline of the profession in the profession itself, subject to appeal to the Supreme Court.
6. To lay down standards of professional conduct and etiquette.

3. The end of imperial and racial privilege. The precedence of the English barrister was abolished; admission now depends solely on an Indian law degree and enrolment under section 24. The profession became fully Indian.
4. Self-government. Admission, regulation, discipline and disbarment passed from the courts to Bar Councils elected by advocates. After Supreme Court Bar Association v. Union of India (1998) it is settled that a court exercising its contempt jurisdiction cannot debar an advocate from practice, because that power belongs to the Bar Councils under the Act.
5. A national code of conduct, laid down by the Bar Council of India under section 49(1)(c), replacing the varying practice of different High Courts.
6. A structured disciplinary process with a defined appeal: section 35 for the punishments (reprimand, suspension, removal), section 37 for appeal to the Bar Council of India, section 38 for further appeal to the Supreme Court, section 36B for a one-year time limit.
7. A monopoly of practice with corresponding duties. Section 29 makes advocates the only class entitled to practise law, and section 33 bars others from appearing.

For full marks, cover: the Act of 1861 and its features, the Act of 1935 and its features, the position under the Constitution today, a comparison, and an assessment of what survives.

1. The Indian High Courts Act, 1861

Purpose. To end the dual system of courts by abolishing the Supreme Courts (Crown courts applying English law in the Presidency towns) and the Sadar Diwani and Sadar Nizamat Adalats (Company courts applying personal law in the mofussil), and to merge them.

Salient features:

1. Amalgamation. One High Court in each of Calcutta, Bombay and Madras, taking over the jurisdiction of both abolished systems, established by Letters Patent in 1862, re-issued 1865.
2. Composition. A Chief Justice and not more than fifteen puisne judges.

1. The Federal Court was created (inaugurated 1 October 1937): a Chief Justice and not more than six judges, with exclusive original jurisdiction in disputes between the Federation and the Provinces or States, appellate jurisdiction where a High Court certified a substantial question of interpretation of the Act, and advisory jurisdiction on a reference by the Governor-General. An appeal lay from it to the Privy Council, so it was not the final court.
2. The High Courts (sections 219 to 234) were continued as courts of record, with such jurisdiction as they already had.
3. Appointment of High Court judges by His Majesty; no fixed strength; retirement at 60; removal by His Majesty on a report of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council for misbehaviour or infirmity.
4. Qualifications: a barrister of ten years' standing, an ICS member of ten years' standing who had been a district judge for three, or a pleader of ten years' standing.
5. Salaries fixed by His Majesty in Council, charged on provincial revenues, and not variable to a judge's disadvantage.

3. The position in present times

Under the Constitution: Article 214 provides a High Court for each State; Article 216, a Chief Justice and such judges as the President appoints, with no ceiling; Article 217, appointment by the President with the collegium's primacy after the Second and Third Judges Cases and the NJAC case (2015), qualification being ten years' judicial office or ten years as an advocate, and retirement at 62; removal only by an address of both Houses on proved misbehaviour or incapacity; salaries charged on the Consolidated Fund (Articles 202(3)(d), 229(3)); writ jurisdiction under Article 226 in every High Court, for Fundamental Rights and any other purpose; superintendence under Article 227, unrestricted; control of the subordinate judiciary under Articles 233 to 235; court of record under Article 215; and appeal to the Supreme Court of India, which replaced both the Federal Court and the Privy Council in 1950.

4. The comparison

5. Assessment: what survives

From 1861 survives the institution itself. The High Courts of Calcutta, Bombay and Madras sitting today are the courts that Act created; their original and appellate jurisdictions, their Letters Patent, their status as courts of record and much of their procedure descend directly from it. Article 225 of the Constitution expressly continued the jurisdiction of the existing High Courts and the law administered by them, which is a written acknowledgment that 1861 was not superseded but inherited.

From 1935 survives the structure of the federation and of the judiciary above the High Courts. The Federal Court is the model for the Supreme Court; the distribution of legislative powers in three lists, the office of Governor, and much of the administrative machinery were carried into the Constitution.

For full marks, cover: what a precedent is, ratio and obiter, the kinds of precedent, the constitutional provisions, the merits and demerits of the doctrine, then law reporting, its history in India, its advantages, and how the two together built the administration of justice.

Part 1: Judicial precedents

Meaning. A judicial precedent is a decision of a court which serves as an authority for deciding a later case raising the same point of law. The doctrine that a court should follow such decisions is stare decisis, stare decisis et non quieta movere, to stand by decided matters and not disturb settled points.

Ratio decidendi and obiter dicta. What binds is the ratio decidendi, the legal principle on which the decision rests, applied to the material facts. Obiter dicta, observations made by the way and not necessary to the decision, are of persuasive value only. Separating the two is the working skill the doctrine demands.

Kinds of precedent:

Merits: certainty, so that a lawyer can advise; equality, since like cases are decided alike; efficiency, since settled points are not reargued; growth of the law by reasoning from decided cases; and a check on judicial arbitrariness.

Demerits: rigidity, if a bad decision must be followed; bulk and complexity, since the reports run to many thousands of volumes; the risk of illogical distinctions drawn to escape an inconvenient authority; and the fact that precedent is made retrospectively, so that the parties are judged by a rule declared after their conduct.

Part 2: Law reporting

Meaning. The systematic recording and publication of judicial decisions, with the facts, the arguments and the reasons, so that the principle can be found and applied afterwards.

History in India.

1. Before the nineteenth century there was no reporting, and the decisions of the Adalats and the Mayor's Courts were not published at all. The law was in the breast of the judge.

5. Development of the law, since a reported judgment can be followed, distinguished, criticised or overruled.
6. A check on judicial arbitrariness, because reasons that will be published are reasons exposed to scrutiny.
7. Saving of judicial time.
8. Material for legal education and research.
9. Material for law reform, since the Law Commission's work rests on the reports.

Part 3: How the two built the administration of justice in India

1. They created a single legal system out of many courts. Before 1861 the Crown's courts and the Company's courts had separate appellate lines and no common authority. Precedent, working through the Privy Council and later the Supreme Court, made one law apply in all of them.
2. They gave India the technique of law. It was through the Privy Council, whose decisions bound every Indian court, that stare decisis, the citation of authority and the distinction between ratio and obiter entered Indian practice.

Assessment

Precedent and reporting are one institution in two halves: the doctrine without the reports is unusable, and the reports without the doctrine are merely a record. Together they gave India a single, ascertainable and developing law administered alike in every court, which is what "the administration of justice" means. The standing criticism is the sheer volume of case law, which now makes research a specialised skill and puts the law at some distance from the ordinary citizen it is meant to govern.