Judicial review and the vanishing trial

The thesis aims to contribute to the 'vanishing trial' debate. The first part updates and extends the existing body of research in this field on civil cases in courts of first instance in England and Wales, specifically the County Court, the Queen's Bench Division and the Chancery Division, both individually and combined. Three different aspects of the vanishing trial are examined - the number of cases coming into the litigation system, the number of trials and the proportion of proceedings initiated that are disposed after trial. Current studies examined patterns between the late 1950s and 2011. This thesis provides an extended analysis, for the period 1949 to 2017, analysing whether the patterns identified in existing literature remain an accurate representation of trends in civil first instance cases. The second part fills a gap in the existing literature by bringing public law into the vanishing trial debate. Judicial review cases were only briefly mentioned in a single study into the vanishing trial as showing a contrasting trend of growth between 2004 and 2011. There has however been no analysis within the vanishing trial debate as to why judicial review is bucking the trend, or the implications of this for the overall vanishing trial thesis. Separate to the vanishing trial debate, there has been a considerable body of empirical research into trends in judicial review. This literature has however only engaged to a very limited extent with trends in other areas of the litigation system. The aim of this section is to bring together the two bodies of literature by comparing and contrasting trends between civil law and judicial review cases between 1981 and 2017 for all three of the elements highlighted in the vanishing trial debate. It also aims to explore potential underlying reasons behind any convergences and divergences in patterns observed.