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Practice Statement
The Practice Statement [1966] 3 All ER 77 was a statement made in the House of Lords by Lord Gardiner LC on 26 July 1966 on behalf of himself and the Lords of Appeal in Ordinary, that they would depart from precedent in the Lords in order to achieve justice.
Until the year 1966, the House of Lords in the United Kingdom was bound to follow all of its previous decisions under the principle of stare decisis, even if this created "injustice" and "unduly restrict(s) the proper development of the law" (London Tramways Co. v London County Council [1898] AC 375). The Practice Statement 1966 is authority for the House of Lords to depart from their previous decisions. It does not affect the precedential value of cases in lower courts; all other courts that recognise the Supreme Court (formerly the House of Lords) as the court of last resort are still bound by Supreme Court (and House of Lords) decisions. Before this, the only way a binding precedent could be avoided was to create new legislation on the matter.
A germane example is the case of Anderton v Ryan (1985) where the House of Lords interpreted the Criminal Attempts Act 1981 in such a way as to make the Act virtually ineffective. Only one year later in R v Shivpuri (1986) Lord Bridge (a member of the erroneous majority in Anderton) acknowledged the error and said "the Practice Statement is an effective abandonment of our pretension to infallibility. If a serious error embodied in a decision of this House has been distorted by the law, the sooner it is corrected the better".
By contrast, in Knuller v DPP, Lord Reid, who had previously given a strong dissenting judgment in Shaw v DPP, said while he still disagreed with the majority decision in that case, in the interests of certainty he would not overturn Shaw (even though the Practice Statement had given authority to do so).
Suggestions that a rigid adherence to stare decisis be dropped had been made prior to 1966, initially by Lord Wright in an article for the Cambridge Law Journal in 1943, and by Lord Gardiner and others in the 1963 book, Law Reform Now.
This is the text of the Practice Statement:
Their Lordships regard the use of precedent as an indispensable foundation upon which to decide what is the law and its application to individual cases. It provides at least some degree of certainty upon which individuals can rely in the conduct of their affairs, as well as a basis for orderly development of legal rules.
Their Lordships nevertheless recognise that too rigid adherence to precedent may lead to injustice in a particular case and also unduly restrict the proper development of the law. They propose therefore, to modify their present practice and, while treating former decisions of this house as normally binding, to depart from a previous decision when it appears right to do so.
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Practice Statement
The Practice Statement [1966] 3 All ER 77 was a statement made in the House of Lords by Lord Gardiner LC on 26 July 1966 on behalf of himself and the Lords of Appeal in Ordinary, that they would depart from precedent in the Lords in order to achieve justice.
Until the year 1966, the House of Lords in the United Kingdom was bound to follow all of its previous decisions under the principle of stare decisis, even if this created "injustice" and "unduly restrict(s) the proper development of the law" (London Tramways Co. v London County Council [1898] AC 375). The Practice Statement 1966 is authority for the House of Lords to depart from their previous decisions. It does not affect the precedential value of cases in lower courts; all other courts that recognise the Supreme Court (formerly the House of Lords) as the court of last resort are still bound by Supreme Court (and House of Lords) decisions. Before this, the only way a binding precedent could be avoided was to create new legislation on the matter.
A germane example is the case of Anderton v Ryan (1985) where the House of Lords interpreted the Criminal Attempts Act 1981 in such a way as to make the Act virtually ineffective. Only one year later in R v Shivpuri (1986) Lord Bridge (a member of the erroneous majority in Anderton) acknowledged the error and said "the Practice Statement is an effective abandonment of our pretension to infallibility. If a serious error embodied in a decision of this House has been distorted by the law, the sooner it is corrected the better".
By contrast, in Knuller v DPP, Lord Reid, who had previously given a strong dissenting judgment in Shaw v DPP, said while he still disagreed with the majority decision in that case, in the interests of certainty he would not overturn Shaw (even though the Practice Statement had given authority to do so).
Suggestions that a rigid adherence to stare decisis be dropped had been made prior to 1966, initially by Lord Wright in an article for the Cambridge Law Journal in 1943, and by Lord Gardiner and others in the 1963 book, Law Reform Now.
This is the text of the Practice Statement:
Their Lordships regard the use of precedent as an indispensable foundation upon which to decide what is the law and its application to individual cases. It provides at least some degree of certainty upon which individuals can rely in the conduct of their affairs, as well as a basis for orderly development of legal rules.
Their Lordships nevertheless recognise that too rigid adherence to precedent may lead to injustice in a particular case and also unduly restrict the proper development of the law. They propose therefore, to modify their present practice and, while treating former decisions of this house as normally binding, to depart from a previous decision when it appears right to do so.