A hard look at common law administrative tribunals
Keywords:
Judges, litigation, administrative tribunals, Jueces, litigio, tribunales administrativosAbstract
This paper looks at common law administrative tribunals. For legal-historical reasons, these bodies are located at the bottom of the judicial hierarchy or outside of it; its adjudicators often have less training, formal protections and resources than judges of the general court system, yet are required to handle a huge caseload. One difficulty is that administrative tribunals are often not part of the litigation data, skewing statistics. Another difficulty is more substantive: it makes sense for “lower courts” to be assigned cases traditionally considered less legally complicated and overall “less important”; yet common law administrative tribunals often deal with highly complex, socially sensitive legal issues with major potential consequences for litigants’ rights such as bankruptcy, immigration or welfare. Not only should common law administrative tribunals be fully counted in court data, but they should also receive more resources and sufficient judicial oversight to ensure their good operation and litigants’ rights.Este artículo se centra en los tribunales administrativos de derecho consuetudinario. Por razones jurídico-históricas, estas instituciones se ubican en lo más bajo de la jerarquía judicial, o fuera de ella; los jueces suelen tener menos preparación, protecciones formales y recursos que los jueces del sistema general de tribunales, pero se les exige gestionar un enorme número de casos. Una de las dificultades es que los tribunales administrativos no suelen ser parte de los datos de litigio, provocando unas estadísticas distorsionadas. Otra dificultad es más substantiva: es lógico que a los "tribunales inferiores" se les asignen casos tradicionalmente considerados menos complicados y, en general, “menos importantes”; sin embargo, los tribunales administrativos de derecho consuetudinario suelen tener que ocuparse de casos jurídicos altamente complejos y sobre temas socialmente sensibles, con consecuencias potenciales muy importantes para los derechos de los litigantes, como por ejemplo la bancarrota, la inmigración o el bienestar. Los tribunales administrativos de derecho consuetudinario no sólo deberían ser considerados íntegramente en los datos judiciales, sino que también deberían recibir más recursos y una supervisión judicial suficiente para asegurar su buen funcionamiento y los derechos de los litigantes.
Available from: https://doi.org/10.35295/osls.iisl/0000-0000-0000-1150
Downloads
Downloads:
PDF 737
XML 899
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
OSLS strictly respects intellectual property rights and it is our policy that the author retains copyright, and articles are made available under a Creative Commons licence. The Creative Commons Non-Commercial Attribution No-Derivatives licence is our default licence, further details available at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0 If this is not acceptable to you, please contact us.
The non-exclusive permission you grant to us includes the rights to disseminate the bibliographic details of the article, including the abstract supplied by you, and to authorise others, including bibliographic databases, indexing and contents alerting services, to copy and communicate these details.
For information on how to share and store your own article at each stage of production from submission to final publication, please read our Self-Archiving and Sharing policy.
The Copyright Notice showing the author and co-authors, and the Creative Commons license will be displayed on the article, and you must agree to this as part of the submission process. Please ensure that all co-authors are properly attributed and that they understand and accept these terms.