ABSTRACT
In England and Wales there is a mixed justice/welfare system typical of many other countries. An adversarial system of justice can only operate on the basis of assumed personal responsibility for behaviour. Conceptually, then, the system is in permanent tension between its judicial and its social work elements. Although the lay status of the bench members sets them apart, in one crucial respect, from the surrounding "professional" services, their part-time participation in the juvenile justice system is of a piece with all the rest. Justice and welfare had, over the preceding century, become "promiscuously mingled and mixed" to a degree which earlier jurists would have deemed impossible, but the potency of the remaining legal element now became a sticking point which prevented the complete homogenization of the two elements into one neat whole. Like other forms of the drama, courts also require the presence of an audience.
