One change in the past year has been to remove the requirement for candidates to have
a background in a particular jurisdiction such as civil, crime or family — instead they can be selected on their potential to be a judge in a given jurisdiction, with the Judicial College providing training after appointment.
More importantly, the observation of Lord Hoffmann
in the ICS case that construction is «highly sensitive to the context of, and
background to, the
particular utterance» has seen some much needed development both
in this and other
jurisdictions of the importance of the factual context.