judiciary, branch of government whose task is the authoritative adjudication of controversies over the application of laws in specific situations.
Conflicts brought before the judiciary are embodied in cases involving litigants, who may be individuals, groups, legal entities (e.g., corporations), or governments and their agencies. See also constitutional law, court, and procedural law.
Conflicts that allege personal or financial harm resulting from violations of law or binding legal agreements between litigants—other than violations legally defined as crimes—produce civil cases. Judicial decisions in civil cases often require the losing or offending party to pay financial compensation to the winner. Crimes produce criminal cases, which are officially defined as conflicts between the state or its citizens and the accused (defendant) rather than as conflicts between the victim of the crime and the defendant. Judicial decisions in criminal cases determine whether the accused is guilty or not guilty. A defendant found guilty is sentenced to punishments, which may involve the payment of a fine, a term of imprisonment, or, in the most serious cases in some legal systems, state-imposed physical mutilation or even death (see capital punishment).
Judiciaries also frequently resolve administrative cases, disputes between individuals, groups, or legal entities and government agencies over the application of laws or the implementation of government programs. Most legal systems have incorporated the principle of state sovereignty, whereby governments may not be sued by nonstate litigants without their consent. This principle limits the right of litigants to pursue remedies against government actions. Nevertheless, the right of citizens to be free from the arbitrary, improper, abusive application of laws and government regulations has long been recognized and is the focus of administrative cases.
Legal systems differ in the extent to which their judiciaries handle civil, criminal, and administrative cases. In some, courts hear all three kinds of disputes. In others there are specialized civil, criminal, and administrative courts. Still others have some general and some specialized courts.
In many cases the conflicts that are nominally brought to courts for resolution are uncontested. The majority of civil cases—such as those involving divorce, child custody, or the interpretation of contracts—are settled out of court and never go to trial. The same is true for criminal cases in the United States, where the practice of extrajudicial plea bargaining is used extensively. The different criminal process that characterizes the United Kingdom and civil-law countries makes plea bargaining of the sort practiced in the United States less likely—or even officially impossible. Nevertheless, there is evidence that analogous practices for generating and accepting guilty pleas are common in the United Kingdom and are not unknown in Germany. In cases of plea bargaining the court’s function is administrative, limited to officially ratifying and recording the agreement the parties have reached out of court.
When the judiciary does decide a controversy, a body of regulations governs what parties are allowed before the court, what evidence will be admitted, what trial procedure will be followed, and what types of judgments may be rendered. Judicial proceedings involve the participation of a number of people. Although the judge is the central figure, along with the parties to the controversy and the lawyers who represent them, there are other individuals involved, including witnesses, clerks, bailiffs, administrators, and jurors when the proceeding involves a jury.
The stated function of the courts is the authoritative adjudication of controversies over the application of laws in specific situations. However, it is unavoidable that courts also make law and public policy, because judges must exercise at least some measure of discretion in deciding which litigant claims are legally correct or otherwise most appropriate. Lawmaking and policy making by courts are most evident when powerful national supreme courts (e.g., those in the United States, Germany, and India) exercise their power of judicial review to hold laws or major government actions unconstitutional. They also can occur, however, when judiciaries are behaving as administrators, even when they are merely ratifying agreements reached out of court. Patterns of settlement for suits between employers and employees may be more favourable to employees than formal law would seem to require, because they are influenced by de facto changes in the law that may result from the decisions by juries or trial judges who may regularly be more sympathetic to workers. Formal laws regulating child custody or financial settlements in divorce cases can similarly be altered over time as juries process the claims of the litigants before them in persistent ways.
After a court decision has been made, it may or may not require enforcement. In many cases the parties accept the judgment of the court and conform their behaviour to it. In other cases a court must order a party to cease a particular activity. The enforcement of such orders is carried out by the executive branch and may require funding from the legislative branch. The judiciary has been described as the least-dangerous branch of government because it has “neither the purse nor the sword,” but, in reality, enforcement of the orders of any government institution depends on the enforcing institution’s acceptance of the issuing institution’s right to make the ruling and to have it enforced.