Celebrate Lady Hale – then make the senior judiciary more diverse | Erika Rackley

Occurring just two years shy of the centenary of women entering the legal profession, Lady Hale’s appointment as president of the UK supreme court is a landmark for women lawyers and judges and for women in public life more generally. Another first ticked off a list that remains disappointingly long.

The widespread enthusiasm with which Lady Hale’s appointment has been greeted is not surprising. However, it is not simply because the president will soon be a woman. Rather it is because the president will be this woman: Lady Hale.

Academic, law reformer, feminist, judge, over the years Lady Hale has made a distinctive and significant contribution to the law on a number important social issues including FGM, shared property, marriage, mental health and capacity, religious freedom, equality and children’s rights, pensions, domestic abuse and sexual violence. She is one of the busiest and most visible of the justices. Not only has she sat on more cases than any other serving or retired justice (just over half of all cases heard by the court), she is a regular speaker at university, professional and other public events in the UK and overseas, as well as a fixture on court’s newly established Instagram account – most recently playing table tennis with court staff.

One reason for this visibility is what she has described as her “scarcity value”. Unlike many other women judges who dismiss their gender as irrelevant, Lady Hale has been consistently conscious of her position as the only woman on the supreme court, alluding to it in her judgments – most famously perhaps in her comment in Radmacher (formerly Granatino) v Granatino (2010) that there was “a gender dimension to the issue” under consideration by the court (the enforcement of a prenuptial agreement) “which some may think ill-suited to decision by a court consisting of eight men and one woman” – as well as in her extra-judicial speeches and writings.

“I can think of a few judgments where my experience and perceptions of life made a difference to my view of the law, often but not always a view which my brethren were then persuaded (not necessarily by me) to share,” she said in a 2014 lecture to the women lawyers’ division of the Law Society. “Even if we [women judges] do not persuade our colleagues to share our point of view, it is important that we articulate it.”

Happily, come the autumn, she will no longer be on her own. The number of women on the supreme court is set to double. Thirteen years after Lady Hale’s appointment, Lady Justice Black will be the second ever woman to sit on the court. We are still waiting for the first BAME supreme court justice to be appointed. While Mr Justice Singh’s groundbreaking appointment to the court of appeal, also announced last week, is a welcome and, at least on current appointment practices, necessary step in that direction, the pace of progress toward a diverse senior judiciary remains glacial.

However, those debates are for another day. That things should be even better should not distract from the significance of Lady Hale’s achievement. Now is the time for celebration and for reflection. To be the first is often to be a beacon for other’s hopes and lightning rod for their disappointments. Lady Hale has been here before. For many, she’s already an inspirational judicial leader. Now it’s official.