by a series of judicial initiatives, and the courts have found themselves in
conflict with governments of both parties over the interpretation of statutes.
The recruitment pattern of the judiciary is of political interest because it has
frequently been assumed by critics that the law has an individualistic and
conservative bias which, when combined with a socially unrepresentative
judiciary, militates against collectivist policies. For this reason early experi-
ments with extended welfare provision in Britain—for example by the Liberal
governments of the early 20th century—provided thattribunalsrather than
the ordinary courts should resolve disputes about such matters as workers’
compensation and old-age pensions. For a period lasting up to the 1950s
attempts were made by Parliament to protect some statutes from judicial
intervention by excluding any appeal from statutory tribunals to the ordinary
court system. However, in a series of decisions, of which the Anisminic case is
the most important (Anisminic was a company trading in Egypt which claimed
compensation for losses incurred as a result of unrest in Egypt), the courts
found ways around these procedures to maintain their ultimate right to
supervise all quasi-judicial activity.
In some legal systems (for example in England and Wales) recruitment to the
higher judiciary is almost entirely from the litigating branch of the legal
profession (the bar); the bar’s near monopoly on such appointments was
demonstrated by their relatively successful fight against initiatives by the
Thatcher government (1979–90) to make judicial selection more open. In
other systems, especially in Europe, the judiciary is a career for which lawyers
opt at the very beginning of their professional practice. In some jurisdictions—
mainly a number of states within the USA—judges are elected, though seldom
by a process which approximates to the partisan conflict of ordinary political
elections. Nevertheless, judges in such jurisdictions can lose their seats if their
decisions anger the public, as was demonstrated in 1987 when the Chief Justice
of the California Supreme Court, Rose Bird, lost her seat because her liberal
decisions in matters like the death penalty were not in keeping with public
attitudes.
Because of the danger of corruption and undue or improper influence on
the judiciary, most democracies make it difficult to remove judges, although
where they are elected (or, as in California, appointed and then submitted for
election or ratification) they may be subjected torecalland are therefore also
subjected to direct political constraints. A more common term than ‘the
judiciary’ in continental European countries is ‘the magistracy’.
Junta
Junta is the Spanish word for a council or board, but its general use in politics,
for which the full Spanish phrase would bejunta militar, is ‘military govern-
Junta