Struck out! (And a telling silence)
My Part 8 claim on court attribution has been summarily struck out — with costs — and without reasons
I don’t normally work on my birthday. I take a day off for myself. But I have something I want to share, and it gives me satisfaction to do so, so it passes the Special Personal Day Test.
Yesterday I received a court order summarily striking out my Part 8 claim. The claim sought to clarify a point of law concerning magistrates’ courts operating under the Single Justice Procedure. The question I asked was orthodox:
Is jurisdiction in an individual case vested through the abstract operation of the statutory machinery as a whole, or does it require specific, traceable acts?
This is a question of how jurisdiction is legally attributed to a court in an individual case. The legislation does not answer this directly, and there are multiple credible readings. Part 8 of the Civil Procedure Rules exists to determine precisely this kind of question of law in the absence of factual dispute. It engages downstream issues of foreseeability, traceability, and the requirement that tribunals be “established by law”.
A person subject to legal proceedings must be able to identify the tribunal exercising jurisdiction in their case. I had previously attempted to raise the same underlying issue — “which court, in law, is said to have convicted me?” — by way of Judicial Review. That claim was recharacterised and not determined. The same judge has now struck out the Part 8 claim. The question has therefore not been answered — twice.
I have also attempted to pursue the issue through a Case Stated appeal, which was not processed, and through an application under section 142 of the Magistrates’ Courts Act 1980, which produced no ruling. The result is that a discrete question of legal authority has not been determined in any forum. These routes address decisions within individual cases, but do not provide a mechanism for determining the underlying question of statutory attribution.
The underlying concern is not complex. The modern legal system relies heavily on procedural abstraction to process high volumes of cases. The machinery runs; therefore the result is treated as valid. But even within an abstract statutory model, legal authority must attach in the individual case through identifiable means. If that mechanism is not articulated, it is not capable of effective verification on the record, and correspondingly cannot be meaningfully challenged.
That matters. Jurisdiction must be attributable to a legally constituted court in a specific case. If it is not, being a floating general capability, then the basis of authority becomes unclear — and hard to contest. This becomes real when one is faced with multiple competing and fragmented designations for the court, none of which cleanly maps to statutory authority — the “ghost court” problem I have faced.
All I have done is ask, in effect, for the “receipt” for my conviction — both in my own case, and as a matter of general law. I sought legal certainty over the tribunal in law, nothing more. That question was squarely before the Court, and has now been refused determination.
The Government Legal Department did not apply to strike out the claim. They advanced a conventional defence, to which I responded by refining the issue into a clear binary: either jurisdiction arises at the level of the individual case, or it arises solely from the abstract statutory structure. That question was properly before the Court.
The Court has power to strike out a claim of its own initiative. But where it does so, particularly on a question of jurisdiction, it must explain why.
No reasons were given. The order states only that the claim:
“discloses no reasonable grounds for bringing a claim in the civil courts, the Court having no jurisdiction in respect of the subject matter of the proceedings.”
That is a conclusion, not an explanation. Without reasons, the legal basis of the decision cannot be understood or properly reviewed. The claim was struck out without adversarial argument or testing of the issue, which would ordinarily assist in refining and resolving a question of law.
The claim raised a conventional question of statutory construction concerning jurisdiction. It did not seek to disrupt the system, only to require it to explain itself on its own terms. If this question cannot be determined here, no forum has been identified in which it can be determined.
The question may be sensitive, as it touches on the architecture of a high-volume criminal procedure. But it is not exotic or fringe. It is a straightforward legal question, carefully framed over several months to be narrow, neutral, and justiciable.
And it remains unanswered.
I can appeal the strike out, and I have a strong basis for doing so. It is another court fee that I cannot easily afford, and further costs risks. But if we tolerate criminal convictions from courts whose identity is not fixed with certainty in law, then we have conceded a principle that open a door to much overreach and even mischief.
My personal sense of the matter is that I have hit a raw nerve. It reflects a system that seeks the throughput and cost benefits of abstraction, without the liability of being able to realise something real on demand, and be precise in the authority claims it makes. It is as much a legitimacy issue as a law one; criminal justice should not mirror what would be treated as defective or misleading instruments in a civil context. The optics are not good.
There is a difference between wrongs that are contrary to the law, and wrongs that arise from how the law is applied. If legality becomes self-authorising — “it is valid because it was done” — then the ability to appeal to law to review and correct it is diminished. That is a serious concern.
In that sense, this strike-out achieves what I set out to do: it forces the system to reveal its position on the use (and abuse) of abstraction. And in not answering, without signposting to another forum, I got my answer.
The refusal to determine the question is itself a determination of sorts.