The Legal System provides an overview of the institutions, personnel and procedures that make up the legal system in England and Wales explaining and critically evaluating current changes. The text explores a number of key competing themes and underlying tensions which run through the legal system in today's modern society thereby encouraging students to develop an in-depth understanding of the subject. The book draws out the difficult dilemmas which the system is currently facing: Should efficiency be prioritised over quality of justice? Is the civil justice system fundamentally private or public? Can litigation be discouraged without reducing access to justice? These are the sorts of questions which must be addressed in order to understand the direction in which the legal system is moving. Nor are the answers necessarily driven by the needs and internal logic of the system itself. The book shows how political and economic priorities are just as important in determining the policies which shape the legal system today.