HEARING DATE 14th MARCH 1997
Law student - University - Dispute examination result - No visitor appointed - Jurisdiction - High Court not a court of appeal in such cases
COUNSEL
The Plaintiff appeared in person
JUDGMENT BY HIRST LJ:
This is the plaintiff's application for leave to appeal against an order made by His Honour Judge Simpson in the Mayors and City of London County Court on 2 December 1996, whereby he dismissed the plaintiff's appeal from an order of District Judge Samuels dated 5 August 1995 striking out the plaintiff's claim. The plaintiff has come to this court out of time and needs an extension. While I am not sure that I ought to do so, I shall grant him an extension of time and deal with the case on the merits.
The proceedings are a civil action issued by the plaintiff on 17 June 1996 seeking, in effect, a mandatory injunction to compel the defendant university, the London Guildhall University, to award him a first class Honours degree in Law or for damages in the alternative. There was a serious dispute, which the applicant has explained to me clearly and in full detail, as to whether the plaintiff had completed his law course so as to become entitled to a degree. One of his particular grievances is that he had completed the necessary modules for which he should have been given credit in order to be awarded his degree. It is his case that he in fact completed his course; alternatively, that the defendant was negligent, in breach of contract or in breach of fiduciary duty in its conduct of an internal review of his examinations, the defendant having contended that he failed to pass enough subjects to attain his degree, and that the internal review of his examinations was conducted properly and conscientiously.
I stress as clearly as I can that I am not entering into the rights and wrongs of the argument between the applicant and the university in any way. I have no means of judging where the rights and wrongs of that situation lie. The judge and the district judge took exactly the same view, and non-suited the plaintiff, relying on the decisions of Thorne v University of London [1966] 2 QB 237, [1966] 2 All ER 338 and Patel v University of Bradford Senate and Another [1978] 3 All ER 841, [1978] 1 WLR 1488, in which similar claims were struck out for the reason that disputes over the construction and application of university regulations as to examinations or degrees were within the exclusive jurisdiction of the visitor of the university and were not justiciable in the High Court.
The applicant attacks that conclusion on the ground that this university does not have a visitor. He points out that at one stage, up to 1992, they did have what he perceives as the equivalent of a visitor in the shape of the Council for the National Academic Award (CNAA) but that body had become defunct in October 1992. He therefore says that because there is no visitor, therefore this court is not, and the judges below were not, bound by the decision in the cases of Thorne and Patel to which I have referred. In my judgment, that is an unsound argument. There is the clearest statement from Lord Justice Diplock (as he then was) in the Thorne case, with which Salmon LJ agreed, at page 243 of the former report:
"The High Court does not act as a Court of Appeal from university examiners. Speaking for my own part, I am very glad that it declines this jurisdiction."
In other words, there is a categorical statement binding on me that this is not a matter into which the court will enter.
It is true, as the applicant says, that there is no visitor here, but there is a clear and well laid out procedure in relation to complaints about examinations which is contained in the university regulations, which are to be found at page 20 and the ensuing pages of the file. If the university departed from their own rules in any respect, that might - I emphasize might; I am not saying would - have been a ground for an application for judicial review. Indeed, the applicant, at the end of his argument, submitted that he was entitled here to invoke such a procedure on the footing that the court has a supervisory role, but this present proceeding, with which I am concerned and with which the City of London and Mayors Court were concerned, is not a judicial review procedure. It is a claim, in effect, in contract. As I have already said, the authorities are plain that the court will not entertain such a claim in relation to examination results and matters of that kind, which are part of the internal procedure of the university concerned. I cannot turn this case into a judicial review procedure, which would in any event probably be well out of time.
Finally, the applicant said that he had been cheated by his two solicitors, that his legal aid had been cancelled and then reinstated by the first solicitors, and that there have been problems with the second solicitors. That is something with which I cannot concern myself this morning. I am dealing solely with the application for leave to appeal. For these reasons, although I am grateful to the applicant for the clear way in which he has put his case, I am satisfied that the decisions, both of the district judge and the judge below, were correct, and that there is no realistic prospect of an appeal succeeding. For those reasons, I would dismiss the application.
DISPOSITION Application dismissed.