Judicial Committee of the Privy Council Exhibition Workshop

Participants: Stacey Hynd (Exeter), Nandini Chatterjee (Plymouth), Charlotte Smith (Reading), Shane Doyle (Leeds), Diana Paton (Newcastle), Stephanie Jones (Southampton)

Aims and Outcomes:  This workshop provided a preliminary meeting for the academic consultants working to produce an exhibition on the history of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council for the Supreme Court in London during the summer recess July-September 2014. The exhibition will consist of 24 panels, supported by visual displays, artefacts and a downloadable app, hosted in the Supreme Court’s main lobby space. The exhibition will explore how the JCPC served as an evolving hub of the British Empire, a conduit for relations between the constituent parts, which both shaped and was shaped by a wide range of different cultures and communities. It will highlight how “the law” translates and mediates at the crossroads of different societies and communities. The JCPC served (and continues, to some extent, to serve) as a nexus of many different – at times competing – expectations and understandings of how the law should resolve disputes. To achieve this, the workshop participants agreed that selecting a number of ‘personas’, linked to cases with a strong human interest component would be the most effective means of exploring the issues involved. The cases and subsidiary panels selected will cover a wide range of different countries, time periods and areas of the law.