ABSTRACT
The period 1750-1950 witnessed far-reaching changes in trial procedures and court jurisdictions and in the administration of justice more generally. In the previous chapter, the gradual decline in the role of private citizens in bringing prosecutions to court was considered. In tandem with this, it is possible to trace the rise of the profession of barrister and an adversarial trial process. Significant change also occurred in the way in which trials were run, with increasing ceremony and more meticulous analysis of evidence becoming the norm. However, as with all historical study, the really interesting questions are not so much concerned with establishing what happened, but with why it occurred. A key question discussed below (and also touched upon in Chapter 9) is – in whose interests was the judicial system run at this time? Did ‘the courts’ serve everyone, or just a small, wealthy minority? The economist and philosopher Adam Smith asserted in 1766 that ‘laws and government may be considered […] in every case as a combination of the rich to oppress the poor, and preserve to themselves the inequality of goods’, and many historians have subsequently agreed (Hay 1989: 344). There is, however, considerable debate about this issue, and recent research has returned a much more nuanced picture of the use of the criminal law. By the latter part of the nineteenth century, in any case, the role and appearance of the courts within English society had changed considerably. The class strife which had marked much of the early part of century was declining and the courts had arguably become much more accessible to previously marginalized groups such as women and the poor. However, even into the twentieth century, the criminal law and the courts were on occasion operating in a manner suggestive of what, for want of a better term, might be called ‘class bias’.
