In an article in this journal in 2018, I explored the issue of whether judges in the High Court and above retained their status as silks following their judicial appointment, and contrasted the practice in the higher judiciary, where the description is never used, with that in the lower judiciary, particularly the circuit bench, where it is used (‘QC or not QC? A judicial conundrum’, 168 NLJ 7818, p19).
I did not examine the issue of honorary silk, because in the main it is an award for those who do not practise in the courts or hold judicial office; but in his Substack blog on 15 May, the doyen of legal commentators, Joshua Rozenberg—himself an honorary silk—turned his formidable guns on Judge Mithani, a circuit judge, who, unusually, is an honorary silk but uses the designation KC without what Rozenberg calls ‘the qualifier’ of ‘(hon)’ (see A Lawyer Writes, ‘A matter of
