Jackson's Machinery of Justice

The EEC has already had some impact on the substance of English law. Some EEC legislation has direct effect here, and much more has come into effect by being incorporated into English legislation. The European Convention on Human Rights has necessarily had a less marked effect. However, a series of small but significant changes have come about as Parliament has changed the law following rulings of the European Court of Human Rights. More important, perhaps, is the fact that English judges are now beginning to get ‘Convention-minded’. They are becoming aware of the Convention, and are prepared to try to construe English law so as to avoid conflict with it where possible. In one case, for example, the House of Lords refused to give a criminal statute retrospective effect, partly because the European Convention says that no one shall be convicted of criminal offence for doing what was not a crime at the time he did it.

It is less clear that the attitudes and practices of English courts and English lawyers have been altered by contact with Europe in its various manifestations. The EEC has exposed common lawyers to a different tradition of civil trial, a different philosophy to the interpretation of statutes, and a legal profession which is differently organised.