Judgment matters

James Wilson & Alexander Horne question the form & content of appellate court judgments

An issue that has been debated since before the inception of the UK Supreme Court is the form in which judgments are delivered. Any such debate needs to consider two fundamental questions: first, the purpose of the judgment, and secondly, the intended audience. This article is mainly concerned with the former. Appellate judgments serve two primary purposes:
(i) to tell the parties who has won and why; and
(ii) to clarify the law.
It is our contention that both objectives may be adversely affected in part by longer judgments, but more often—and more severely—by multiple judgments being issued with no clear ratio.
Individual judgments have lengthened at all levels in the past few decades, at least in courts of record, as the volumes of the law reports confirm. We suspect several factors are responsible.

l First, the statute book has grown