Baroness Hale of Richmond will succeed Lord Neuberger of Abbotsbury as president of the UK Supreme Court.
In addition, Lady Justice Black, Lord Justice Lloyd Jones and Lord Justice Briggs will all join the Supreme Court as Justices from 2 October 2017, the same day that Lady Hale will be sworn-in officially as president.
Lady Hale was brought up in Richmond, North Yorkshire, where she attended Richmond High School for Girls, a state grammar school. After graduating from Cambridge, Lady Hale taught law at Manchester University from 1966 to 1984, also qualifying as a barrister and practising for a while at the Manchester Bar. She specialised in family and social welfare law and was founding editor of the Journal of Social Welfare and Family Law. In 1984 she was the first woman to be appointed to the Law Commission.
Lady Hale became the UK’s first female Lord of Appeal in Ordinary in January 2004, before the establishment of the Supreme Court in 2009, following five years sitting in the Court of Appeal and five years as a High Court judge. She has been deputy president of the Supreme Court since June 2013.
She said: “It is a great honour and a challenge to be appointed to succeed Lord Neuberger. I look forward to building upon his pioneering achievements, including developing closer links with each part of the United Kingdom, for example by sitting outside London, and improving the ways in which we communicate our work to the public. Recent high-profile cases mean that more people than ever before have heard of the Supreme Court, and we hope that this will help to create a broader understanding of how the judiciary serves society.
“While I of course look forward to working alongside all my colleagues, it is a particular pleasure for me to be taking up the post at the same time as we welcome only the second-ever woman to sit on the UK’s top appeal court.”
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