Baroness Hale has issued a clarion call for women to seek judicial office.
In a speech at the University of Birmingham last week, Lady Hale said there would be six vacancies on the Supreme Court between September 2016 and December 2018 and that: “If we do not manage to achieve a (much) more diverse court in the process of filling them we ought to be ashamed of ourselves.”
Lady Hale said that since she was sworn in as a Lord of Appeal in Ordinary in 2004, 15 people had been sworn in to the same office or as Justices of the Supreme Court. “The court has more than replaced itself since then,” she said. “One might have hoped that the opportunity would have been taken to achieve a more diverse collegium. It has not happened.”
She said: “[Ignoring the two who were sworn in immediately after her] All of those 13 appointments were men. All were white. All but two went to independent fee-paying schools. All but three went to boys’ boarding schools. All but two went to Oxford or Cambridge. All were successful QCs in private practice, although one was a solicitor rather than a barrister. All but two had specialised in commercial, property or planning law. None had spent much, if any, time as an employee.”
Lady Hale said “excellence” was important but so was “diversity of expertise” and “diversity of background and experience”.
“It really bothers me that there are women, who know or ought to know that they are as good as the men around them, but who won’t apply for fear of being thought to be appointed just because they are a woman. We early women believed that we were as good as the men and would certainly not be put off in this way…We owe it to our sex, but also to the future of the law and the legal system, to step up to the plate.”
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