Sir William F. Carroll

Lord Radcliffe Out of Time

“…Lawyers and judges do well to resist the modern "tendency … to discover leading cases before they have proved that they have in them the quality to lead", 136 and precedents should not be followed complacently or slavishly or approached over-reverently; 137 a judge would "be a great fool if" he "thought a particular precedent was wrong" but he felt unable to "put it aside and develop something else". 138 When, in 1966, the House of Lords abandoned its convention of being bound by its own precedents, it "cast aside the shackles it probably never should have worn." 139 Radcliffe's own judgments -all pre-1966 -show that he never considered the shackles to be particularly constraining.…”