Paths to the Bench in Britain: A Quasi-Experimental Study of the Recruitment of a Judicial Elite

This is an initial exploration into the recruitment of an important political elite: the higher British judiciary. It seeks to describe some of the social and career characteristics of this elite over the past century and to identify tentatively some of the crucial factors related to recruitment to different ranks within this elite. In so doing, it seeks to illustrate the utility of "quasi-experimental" research designs in studying elite recruitment. A multi-variate "search strategy" (the Automatic Interaction Detector program, AID) is used to isolate predictors of recruitment. The paper concludes with a call for further, causal analysis of the recruitment of the British higher judiciary.