Orders of the Day — ADMINISTRATION OF JUSTICE BILL [Lords].

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons am ar 27 Gorffennaf 1923.

Danfonwch hysbysiad imi am ddadleuon fel hyn

Photo of Captain Reginald Berkeley Captain Reginald Berkeley , Nottingham Central

I beg to second the Amendment.

I am sure the House must be very grateful to my hon. and learned Friend the Mover for his lucid and masterly exposition of the legal position created by the Bill. There is an old Latin maxim—Inter arma leges silent—and I suppose a corollary to that is that, in a battle of lawyers, a layman should hold his peace. There are, however, some observations which I think it it proper to make on this Bill from the point of view of a layman. I hope the Attorney-General will not consider that I am offensive, if I say that on this occasion, and in explaining the effect of this Bill, I think he has treated the House with less than his usual candour. His argument that the Bill did not restrict but enlarged the existing right of trial by jury is completely vitiated—I was going to say rendered quite absurd, but I do not wish to put it so strongly as that—by the exposition of the true facts of the case to which the House has just listened. It is true the Bill extends the provisions which were made under Wartime legislation passed in connection with the drain upon man-power then taking place, but it is quite incorrect to represent it as an enlargement, or even an equivalent, of the pre-War right.

Put in simple form, the effect of the Bill is that what are called enumerated cases under the Judicature Act, that is to say cases in which it was absolutely essential formerly to have a jury, it is now the right of the parties a claim a jury, and in the non-enumerated cases, in which it was formerly the right of the parties to claim a jury, it is now discretionary in the Court to decide whether a jury will be granted or not. Let us take the non-enumerated cases and see the class of action in which litigants may be deprived of the right to a jury at the discretion of the Court. They include cases of contract, cases of negligence or running down, and cases of assault. In cases belonging to these categories it is surely essential to the proper administration of justice, that litigants should have the right to a jury. The House will not be led away by the illustration which the Attorney-General gave of the fact that in our law, a question as to the law of a foreign country is treated as a question of fact to be proved by an expert. It is quite true that cases of that kind do arise but the difficulties involved in them could always be settled in the way in which the right hon. and learned Gentleman has told us they were settled in the particular case in which he was concerned. They can always be settled by reasonable agreement between counsel on both sides, and if it were not possible to settle in that way, juries are composed of sensible men and in a case where a question of foreign law arose, the Judge would direct the jury as to the bearing of that particular piece of evidence upon the case.