TWENTY-FIVE YEARS AGO, on 26 April 1999, Lord Woolf’s Civil Procedure Rules came into effect. Replacing two existing sets of procedural rules for England’s civil courts, the new CPR was launched to much fanfare — all of England’s county courts closed for a day the week before in order to prepare for the great occasion — and had the laudable aim of creating a cheaper, simpler, and more predictable dispute resolution process for everyone.
Whether the CPR managed to make English civil justice cheaper or simpler is, of course, very much open to doubt, as anyone who has been near an English court in recent years will know. But one lasting effect of the Woolf reforms was to purge English law of much of the specialised vocabulary it had developed…
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The Critic (Digital) - 1 Issue, April 2024