Last reviewed: July 2026 · For use in England & Wales · eLitigant is a Community Interest Company (No. 16566612), not a law firm.
Part Two of “The Public’s Court.” Part One measured the default-judgment machine. This part asks a quieter question: when did the public leave the civil courtroom — and what was supposed to replace it?
Twelve citizens used to sit here
For most of English legal history, the civil courtroom contained something remarkable: a dozen members of the public, sitting in judgment, watching everything. The jury was not only a decision-maker. It was the public’s eye — ordinary people physically present inside the process, seeing how justice was administered in their name.
That presence has almost entirely gone, and it went lawfully and openly. The Court of Appeal in Ward v James [1966] 1 QB 273 ended the routine use of juries in personal injury cases. Section 69 of the Senior Courts Act 1981 (and its county court twin, section 66 of the County Courts Act 1984) confined civil juries to a shortlist — fraud, malicious prosecution, false imprisonment. Then section 11 of the Defamation Act 2013 removed the presumption of jury trial in libel and slander, the last stronghold. Today, a civil jury in England & Wales is a genuine rarity. Almost every civil case — including the 1,200,000 county court judgments recorded in England & Wales in 2025 — is decided by a judge sitting alone.
What the law always understood
None of this was done in the dark, and the judges who built the modern system understood precisely what the public’s presence was for. In Scott v Scott [1913] AC 417 — the House of Lords’ great open-justice case — Lord Shaw of Dunfermline reached for Jeremy Bentham’s words: “Publicity is the very soul of justice. It is the keenest spur to exertion and the surest of all guards against improbity.” Lord Atkinson, in the same case, put it plainly: public trial is “the best security for the pure, impartial, and efficient administration of justice, the best means for winning for it public confidence and respect.”
Read those two sentences again with the jury gone. The principle did not retire when the twelve citizens did. If the public no longer sits inside the process, the process must remain fully visible to the public — that is the deal the open-justice principle strikes, and it is a deal the courts themselves wrote.
Not suspicion — stewardship
To say this is not to doubt the judges who now decide alone; it is to take seriously what the House of Lords said protects them. Publicity, Bentham argued, guards the system — it is how good judging is seen to be good, and how public confidence is earned rather than assumed. A judge sitting alone in an open, observable court inherits the jury’s legitimacy. A hearing nobody can see inherits nothing.
Which raises the modern question. The county courts — where litigants in person actually live, where the defaults of Part One are entered and set aside — are the least observed courts in the country. Part Three, on Friday, is about what “open” should mean in a digital age: what the senior courts already broadcast, what the law still forbids, and how the public’s eye returns to the room.
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