Lady justice: is the judiciary ready for Brenda Hale?

The new president of the UK's Supreme Court is not afraid to disrupt the legal establishment she now leads. Her feminism could shake up not just the young court, but the country

by Afua Hirsch / November 14, 2017 / Leave a comment

Illustration: Tim McDonagh

Brenda Hale is telling a story. “Would you like to know what really happened?”, she asks, leaning towards me across a low coffee table, the wall behind us lined with law reports bound in red and burned orange. There’s something deliciously conspiratorial about the way the President of the Supreme Court asks this question, the promise of something juicy to come.

The story concerns an incident when Hale, then a High Court judge, was staying in official judges’ lodgings, while on the circuit outside London. “There were only six women High Court judges [out of a total of around 70], and they hadn’t really worked out what do to do with a judge who happens to be a woman,” she explains. The lodgings—and the entertainment—were run “very much along the lines of upper middle-class households between the wars.”

Female judges were thus expected to retire to a separate room after dinner, leaving the other judges uninterrupted with their port and male conversation. Hale observed the rule for some time with great annoyance. “When you first join something, you don’t make waves straight away,” she explains. “I went along with it in a very grumpy way! Which is the worst of all possible worlds.”

But one day, a younger female barrister was present. “The junior of the circuit was among the guests for dinner, and I thought, this bright young woman barrister should not be excluded,” she says. “It was because of her that I plucked up courage [to say] we are not leaving.” But there is a twist. Several years later, Hale met the same barrister again and she remembered the incident very differently. “Here was I telling her to do something, which she thought might not endear her to the male judges present. I had put her in a difficult situation.”

But then, by simple dint of being the only woman on her path to the top, Hale has often enough put herself in tricky situations too. It has, some close to her say, taken its toll. “She is a totally fascinating woman, but I found it difficult to work with her,” said one former colleague—who didn’t want to be named—of her time working with Hale. “You have to be obstreperous as a woman to get there, to break that glass ceiling. It’s painful, it leaves…

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Comments

Dinah Rose
November 20, 2017 at 13:03
Thank you, Afua, for this very perceptive and enjoyable piece. It is good to see that Lady Hale has now at last been joined on the Supreme Court by Lady Black. For my money, the immortal Justice Bader Ginsburg gets the last word on this topic. When asked when there would be enough women on the (9 judge) US Supreme Court, she replied: "when there are nine".
1. JimmyMack
  November 25, 2017 at 09:41
  So you, and Justice Ginsburg, are happy with inequality. More unites you with the old guard than you appear to be realise.
James
November 20, 2017 at 13:38
A good piece, but this statement is inaccurate: "the ethnic minority voice has been non-existent". There has been at least one Jewish Supreme Court judge (Lord Neuberger).
JimmyMack
November 25, 2017 at 10:45
"...the ethnic minority voice has been non-existent". Posterity will regard us as unbelievably stupid, patronising and, yes, racist, for thinking there is an 'ethnic voice' at all, or that a handful of (usually) highly-privileged and unrepresentative black and brown people can embody an outlook assumed to be shared by all other black or brown people. Here's a revelation: ethnic minority folk are as varied in their views as the rest of us. And here's something else: female judges no more speak on behalf of women than male judges speak on behalf of men. Neither do they, just by being women in positions of power, somehow makes things better for all women. Working class men have not obviously been advantaged by generations of upper class male dominance. The truth is that identity politics has allowed a class of privileged people to pass themselves off as 'progressive' by championing themselves and other members of their class as part of some disadvantaged group. It's rubbish, we know it and across the Western world we are rejecting it. Best of all, identity politics is being hilariously out-flanked in a way none saw coming. Welcome the first judge with a penis who 'identifies' as a women! Would 'she' qualify as one of Judge Ginsburg's nine, I wonder - see first comment above.
Michael BAron
November 25, 2017 at 12:27
Fine piece but maybe Afua Hirsch does not know of Lady Hale's concerns expressed in her book on Mental Health LAw ,published in the 1980's, on the then law for protection of disabled , mentally impaired adults. The law was then inadequate and did not mirror at all the rise of parent led care societies such as Mencap or the NAS. Lawyers with handicapped children like myself formed a Law Society group in 1987 and began their campaign to change the law. Lady Hale as a Law Commissioner was a supporter and after many Law Commission reports the Mental Capacity Act came into force in 2005. That this long delayed legislation happened is in no small way due to her advocacy that the incapable disabled have rights to be heard throiugh the Act's provision for the appointment of Welfare Deputies.