MacNaughton Lecture: Court adjudication of civil disputes – No judicial right to mismanage a public service

Speaker: Adrian Zuckerman, Professor of Civil Procedure at Oxford University College.

Court-based dispute resolution is a law enforcement public service, but it is barely recognised and delivered as such. This is in stark contrast to other public services. It is universally acknowledged that in order to deliver optimal public benefits with available resources health and education services, for example, need to be professionally managed. Yet, legislatures and the legal profession behave as if court adjudication is different, that it can be satisfactorily delivered without overall management, without oversight of performance and without much accountability for the use of resources.

Professor Zuckerman will argue that the litigation service too must be professionally and adequately managed if it is to deliver effective law enforcement within a reasonable time and at a proportionate cost. It is not suggested that the judges should not manage the civil litigation service. But it is argued that if overall management is to be left to judges they have to think and behave as managers with a public responsibility. What they do not have is a judicial right to mismanage.

About the Alan Aylesworth MacNaughton Lecture

Launched in 1994, thanks to the generosity of Senator MacNaughton (1903–1999), the bi-annual Alan Aylesworth MacNaughton Lecture is devoted to contemporary issues of public policy. Senator MacNaughton was Speaker of the House of Commons, founder and Honorary Chairman of the Canadian World Wildlife Fund, Counsel at Martineau Walker, and a member of the Faculty of Law Advisory Board.