“Ghost courts” — a year of insight and discovery
From court constitution to traceability: uncovering the legal and structural gaps that threaten fairness and lawfulness
Over the past year, readers have supported me in my investigation into what are commonly referred to as “ghost courts” — administrative labels on official documents that seem to claim juridical existence, yet are not directly backed by statute. This journey has been a profound learning experience, requiring both an upgrade to my understanding of the law and a reworking of my hypothesis about what is wrong. The conclusion, however, is clear: this is not a quixotic objection to court naming conventions, nor am I tilting at imagined windmills.
There is a real gap between law and operation, with serious consequences.
What follows is a summary of the core issue I’ve uncovered in the Single Justice Procedure and how it operates in England and Wales. Unlike most other courts, which are formally established by statute, justices of the peace act within a functional model — the tribunal exists when they sit and act judicially. This was unproblematic in an analogue era, where the identity of the court was a physical record in a register book. However, the shift to a national, digitised, and automated system has warped this model, creating gaps.
The purpose of this publication is not merely to share my findings with the public, but to create a shareable synthesis of the key insights. This allows readers to bypass a year of judicial reviews, procedural blockades, and deflections of the issues. While somewhat technical, the material is approachable and relevant to anyone interested in the legitimacy of the Single Justice Procedure. The questions about its legality are significant, but those are downstream; for now, this is focused on the “hinge” upon which everything else turns.
Reader orientation
Before getting into the core analysis, it is worth briefly setting out what this article is — and what it is not.
I did not arrive at this position directly. My starting point was simple and concrete: the names of courts on official documents appeared to refer to specific juridical entities, yet when I attempted to identify those entities in law, I could not find anything that matched. The problem was not one of wording or convention, but of reference — the label appeared to point to an object that could not be clearly located.
That initial observation does not resolve into a straightforward claim that “the court does not exist”. Magistrates’ courts are constituted by justices acting under statutory authority, rather than by a formally named institution. However, that only sharpens the question:
how is that tribunal identified, recorded, and made traceable in practice?
The term “ghost courts” is a convenient shorthand, but it can mislead if taken too literally. The issue is not that nothing exists, but that administrative labels can appear to assert juridical identity without clearly resolving to an identifiable tribunal in the record. In most cases, this does not matter. The system functions, outcomes are produced, and the question is never asked.
The gap becomes visible when the referent is tested — as I did, persistently. If a court name is used on an official document in a way that invites the reader to treat it as identifying the tribunal, then it is reasonable to attempt to locate that tribunal. Where that attempt fails, what is ordinarily handled by assumption has to be examined.
It is at that point that the system becomes harder to explain in a clear, stable, and inspectable way.
It remains possible that defects in attribution, seisin, or sequencing could, in some cases, have consequences for the validity of proceedings. That is not assumed here. The focus is on the prior question:
whether the system consistently provides a record that allows judicial authority to be identified, traced, and — crucially — located when required.
Put simply, the underlying issue is
whether legal authority may be inferred retrospectively from institutional structures and outcomes, or
whether it must be demonstrably instantiated in the record through identifiable tribunals and authenticated judicial acts.
Everything that follows turns on that distinction.
Neutral summary of the year’s progress
The most likely systemic structural limitation in the current HMCTS architecture lies in the Single Justice Procedure (SJP) and the digital case-management systems (Common Platform / SJS) that support it.
These systems are designed for high-volume, automated processing of cases. They generate notices, allocate matters, record outcomes, and trigger enforcement using administrative identifiers such as court names, Local Justice Area codes (e.g. 1752), and venue labels. However, established doctrine (including Judicial College guidance and the Courts Act 2003 framework) is clear that such identifiers have no independent legal significance: the tribunal is constituted by justices (or a District Judge) exercising statutory powers under the commission of the peace.
The resulting structural limitation is this: while seisin arises in law (so a real tribunal “owns” the case), the system does not maintain a single, stable, and inspectable record that clearly attributes the judicial act to an identifiable constituted tribunal instance, nor does it transparently record the continuity of that seisin across procedural stages.
This limitation arises in part because the SJP collapses the traditional sequence of criminal process—initiation, judicial seisin, adjudication, and enforcement—into a single administratively driven workflow, in which tribunal identity is inferred from system outputs rather than explicitly instantiated and recorded.
In SJP cases, where no physical hearing or visible sitting exists, the administrative label on the notice becomes the defendant’s sole interface with judicial authority — yet that label is not designed to perform the constitutional function of identifying the tribunal.
The position is further complicated when a case transitions from SJP to a conventional hearing: the record does not clearly identify how seisin is first constituted (e.g. by a single justice on the papers) nor how it is subsequently transferred or continued when the case moves to a differently constituted tribunal in open court.
The system and its defence may rely interchangeably on multiple models of jurisdiction (the national commission of the peace, individual justices acting in a personal capacity, Local Justice Area designations, or curative doctrines treating naming defects as immaterial).
While each model is valid in abstraction, their combined use without a single, fixed point of attribution results in a lack of a single, stable, and inspectable identification of the tribunal instance.
This is demonstrated on the face of the official record in my own motoring case, which variously identifies the convicting court as:
“North & West Cumbria Magistrates’ Court (Carlisle) (1752)”,
“Carlisle Magistrates’ Court”, and
“Convicting Court: 1752”.
These are operational identifiers, not a coherent attribution of the tribunal. The system is therefore able to process and enforce the case without ever explicitly demonstrating the chain: constituted tribunal → seisin in this specific case → continuity of seisin → judicial act → traceable enforcement authority.
This engages, in a focused and arguable way, questions of
attribution and seisin in fact,
continuity and transfer of seisin between tribunal instances,
sequencing and handoff within the system,
traceability of judicial authority in the record, and
Article 6 ECHR requirements of clarity and foreseeability.
The point is narrow but significant. It does not deny the existence of jurisdiction or seisin in principle. It identifies a structural limitation in
how that jurisdiction is attributed in fact,
how seisin is represented and maintained across procedural stages, and
how both are made transparent within the administrative record.
Where the identity of the tribunal is put in issue on a proper basis, it is for the State to demonstrate, from the record, the constituted tribunal to which the judicial act is attributable.
Where the record does not permit that attribution to be made in a clear, stable, and inspectable way — particularly at the point where adjudicative risk attaches or coercive authority is exercised — the limitation becomes constitutionally material.
Why does this matter?
It may look like a technical issue about record-keeping or system design. It isn’t. It goes to a basic constitutional requirement:
that the exercise of judicial power must be identifiable, attributable, and capable of being verified.
The law allows a functional model of magistrates’ courts. It tolerates abstraction. It permits administrative systems to carry much of the load. But none of that removes the requirement that judicial authority must be capable of being located in fact — not merely inferred from outcomes or from the operation of a system.
The gap identified here sits exactly at that boundary. Most of the time it is invisible, absorbed by convention and assumption. But when the question is asked — which tribunal exercised power in this case? — the system must be able to answer it clearly, from its own record, and without inference.
If it cannot, the issue is no longer one of form. It is one of substance.
This is not just about the Single Justice Procedure, or about one set of documents. It goes to the integrity of the chain by which the State asserts and enforces legal authority. That chain has to be coherent, traceable, and inspectable. If it is not, then what fills the gap is something the law is not supposed to rely on: retrospective inference in place of demonstrable, attributable authority.
There is no need to exaggerate. The system works, most of the time. But that is not the test. The test is whether, when pressed, it can show its workings — whether it can point to the tribunal, the act, and the authority in a way that holds together. Where it cannot, the line between lawful exercise of power and its simulation begins to blur.
This piece does not try to answer every consequence that follows. It identifies the hinge. Whether that hinge turns in any given case is for the courts. But the hinge is there:
a system that can produce and enforce outcomes without consistently providing a record that makes the exercise of judicial power fully transparent, attributable, and inspectable.
That is not just a technical gap.
It is a constitutional one.
Nice summary, Martin. Thanks.