Note (Back) — Chapter VIII

177. The Hierarchy of Tribunals.—In the majority of continental countries a distinction is drawn between ordinary law and what is known as administrative law, i.e., the body of rules governing the conduct of public officials and, more particularly, the adjudication of disputes between these officials, in their public capacity, and private citizens. This differentiation of law entails customarily the maintenance of administrative courts, separate from the ordinary tribunals, in which administrative cases are heard and decided. In Great Britain, however, there is no such thing as administrative law, and in consequence there is no need of administrative courts. Public officials, from the ministers downwards, are amenable to the processes of the ordinary tribunals precisely as are all other classes of people. Simpler, therefore, at this point than the continental systems of courts, the English system is none the less one of the most elaborate and complicated in the world. There are features of it which in origin are mediæval, others which owe their existence to the reforming enterprises of the earlier nineteenth century, and still others which have a history covering hardly more than a generation. Reduced to its simplest aspect, the system comprises, at the bottom, three principal varieties of tribunals—the county courts for civil cases and the courts of the justices of the peace and the borough criminal courts for criminal cases—and, at the top, a Supreme Court of Judicature in two branches, i.e., the High Court of Justice and the Court of Appeal, in addition to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, the House of Lords, and a number of other occasional or special central tribunals.[242]