England only gave criminals a general right to appeal in 1907
Babylon had appeal judges under Hammurabi, and Rome recognised a right of appeal from 509 BC. Yet English common law resisted the idea for centuries. It took at least 28 parliamentary bills of complaint before England adopted modern appeals, for civil cases in 1873 and criminal ones in 1907.
An appeal asks a higher authority to change an official decision. It serves two purposes at once: fixing mistakes in individual cases and clarifying what the law actually means. It differs from judicial review, in which a court checks whether a law or administrative act is invalid for reasons such as lack of jurisdiction.
Correcting errors is ancient. In the first Babylonian dynasty, Hammurabi and his governors acted as the top appeal courts. Rome's Valerian and Porcian laws established a right to appeal, and the empire later built a layered hierarchy in which some cases reached the emperor himself. Japan's Kamakura shogunate, between 1185 and 1333, created a high appellate court called the hikitsuke.
Early English courts, by contrast, knew no appeal from one court to another, only petitions to the Crown. The substitutes, writs of error and certiorari, were narrow. A writ of error was not available by right but only on the attorney general's recommendation, and certiorari at first applied just to minor offences, later reaching serious ones only before judgment. Commentators describe common law as notably slow to embrace appeals, even as some scholars now call the right a substantive liberty interest.
Modern appeals usually target final judgments. Appellate courts typically reconsider questions of law afresh but accept the trial court's findings of fact unless something went wrong in establishing them, though the Netherlands is an exception where the whole case, facts included, is reheard. Judges, not juries, decide, after written briefs and often oral argument, sometimes with input from a friend of the court. Even the vocabulary splits across the Atlantic: an American court declares a judgment affirmed or reversed, while a British one says the appeal is dismissed or allowed.
Source: Appeal
