English law English law is the common law list of national legal systems, legal system of England and Wales, comprising mainly English criminal law, criminal law and Civil law (common law), civil law, each branch having its own Courts of England and Wales, ...

, a practice direction is a supplemental protocol to rules of civil and criminal procedure in the

court A court is an institution, often a government entity, with the authority to adjudicate legal disputes between Party (law), parties and Administration of justice, administer justice in Civil law (common law), civil, Criminal law, criminal, an ...

s – "a device to regulate minor procedural matters" – and is "an official announcement by the court laying down rules as to how it should function."''English Legal System,'' Nineteenth Edition, 2018
/ref> The

Civil Procedure Rules 1998 The Civil Procedure Rules (CPR) were introduced in 1997 as per the Civil Procedure Act 1997 by the Civil Procedure Rule Committee and are the rules of civil procedure used by the Court of Appeal, High Court of Justice, and County Court in civi ...

contains a large number of practice directions which give practical advice on how to interpret the rules themselves. Also, individual courts and judges may make their own practice directions, especially in specialist types of proceedings such as in the

patent A patent is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the legal right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention for a limited period of time in exchange for publishing an sufficiency of disclosure, enabling discl ...

court. A famous example of a practice statement occurred in 1966 when the

House of Lords The House of Lords is the upper house of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. Like the lower house, the House of Commons of the United Kingdom, House of Commons, it meets in the Palace of Westminster in London, England. One of the oldest ext ...

declared itself able to depart from its own precedent decisions in order to achieve justice.

References

External links

Practice directions
on

Her Majesty's Courts Service Her Majesty's Courts Service (HMCS) was an executive agency of the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) and was responsible for the administration of the civil, family and criminal courts in England and Wales. It was created by the amalgamation of the Ma ...

website
Civil procedure rules and practice directions
Civil procedure Criminal procedure English law English civil procedure {{UK-law-stub