Plans for an Irish Court of Appeal?
According to an article by Paul Cullen on the front page of today’s Irish Times, there are moves under way to create a new Court of Appeal for Ireland. This can only be welcome news, both for litigants and for judges.
Even though the nine judges of the Supreme Court can sit now in divisions of three, it can still take up to two years or more for an appeal to be heard; and a Court of Appeal that relieved that backlog of cases and allowed litigants’ appeals to be heard and decided more quickly would undoubtedly be good news for litigants. Moreover, too many cases come to the Court to allow it to do its work as a Supreme Court: at present, it hears more than 300 cases a year, compared with no more than 100 in the US Supreme Court, the Supreme Court of Canada, the High Court of Australia, and the House of Lords (which, in its judicial capacity, is the UK’s highest court). In those jurisdictions, there is an automatic right to appeal to Court of Appeal level from cases at High Court level, so litigants always get the option of an appeal; but there is an appeal from Court of Appeal level to the court of final appeal only in cases where that latter court is persuaded that there are special or exceptional reasons for the appeal to be heard.…