Judicial Notice
The process by which a court accepts certain facts as true without requiring formal proof, because they are matters of common knowledge or can be verified from an authoritative source. Parliament can also confer specific statutory powers to require judicial notice of particular categories of fact.
Independent editorial summary — not the official statute text. Read the official version on legislation.gov.uk.
Judicial notice is generally a common-law tool of evidence, but Parliament has also legislated for it directly where a settled statutory answer is needed. The European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018 confers exactly that kind of statutory power under the heading 'Power to make provision about judicial notice and admissibility', authorising a Minister of the Crown to 'make provision enabling or requiring judicial notice to be taken of a relevant matter'.
That single provision is only one illustration of the concept — it deals specifically with retained EU law questions after Brexit, not with the general common-law doctrine — but it shows the underlying idea in a clean, sourceable form: judicial notice lets a court (or, here, a rule made under statute) treat a defined category of fact as established without each party having to call evidence to prove it afresh in every case. Outside this statutory context, judicial notice more commonly arises at common law for facts that are notorious or readily verifiable, and the applicable rules should be checked separately for any given area of practice.
Related terms
Official sources
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