The enemy of marriage (and Brexit) who’s first woman to be our top judge
BARONESS Hale of Richmond was yesterday named first female president of the UK’s highest court. She takes over as president of the Supreme Court from Lord Neuberger on October 2, Downing Street announced. Here, GUY ADAMS profiles a judge who has attracted criticism for speaking out for easier divorce, and who has also spoken favourably of the process allowing European courts to overrule British ones.
WHEN Brenda Marjorie hale was elevated to the house of Lords – the first female Law Lord – she seized the opportunity to commission her own coat of arms, adorned with scrolls, three frogs (two seated, wearing crowns, and one standing, holding flowers), and four towers topped with imposing medieval battlements.
This magnificent creation bore the motto ‘ Omnia Feminae Aequissimae’, a Latin phrase meaning ‘women are equal to everything’ – which is all the more appropriate now that she has been appointed head of the Supreme Court, the most senior female judge in British history.
Currently the deputy president of the court, Lady hale will take over in October and will have a salary of £225,000. her appointment, at 72, is not just a signal victory for gender equality, but also for the forces of liberalism, whose agenda she has been helping to further for more than 30 years.
She has attracted controversy for her views on divorce and adoption, and caused widespread anger late last year when she intervened in the eU debate to claim the Government could be forced to repeal the european Communities Act before it could trigger Article 50. Critics said the move would have potentially delayed Brexit for years.
Lady hale, a former university lecturer who was educated at grammar school in Yorkshire and at Cambridge, first achieved prominence as a Law Commissioner during the eighties, when she made many high-profile pronouncements which critics blame for undermining the institution of marriage.
One, an essay, was even called The Case Against Marriage.
‘ We should be considering whether the legal institution of marriage continues to serve any useful purpose,’ she wrote in one article. In another, she asked: ‘Do we still think it necessary, desirable or even practicable to grant marriage licences to enter into relationships?’
Describing herself as ‘ a feminist of the kind who would like to see changes in the way society is organised, rather than wanting women to conform to male- determined roles,’ she once argued that shouting by a spouse can be defined as a form of domestic violence.
LADY hale was one of the principal architects in 1989 of the Children Act which opponents claim has stripped parents of power over their children’s lives in favour of the state.
She later endorsed a controversial plan – again dubbed ‘anti-marriage’ – to give cohabiting partners who had lived together for at least two years the right to a share of the home if they separated.
Perhaps her own marital experience was pertinent.
In 1984, shortly after being appointed to the Commission, she left first husband John hogget (with whom she had a daughter) for a fellow commissioner, Julian Farrand. They married just 12 days after the divorce came through in 1992. Today, she and Farrand have grand homes in Westminster and in Richmond, north Yorkshire, filled with objets d’art including a stuffed rabbit, a stuffed mole, and dozens of ceramic frogs.
‘It’s an inside joke between us,’ she once told an interviewer. ‘My husband was my frog prince. now people give us frogs.’
Lady hale became a high Court judge in the Family Division in 1994, where she established herself as a fierce defender of the human Rights Act, which has been used to stop the deportation of many foreign criminals and terror suspects.
Since joining the Supreme Court in 2009, she has not been afraid to cross swords with the Government on issues such as votes for prisoners, and in 2015 she spoke favourably of the process allowing european courts to overrule British ones.
Few were surprised when she joined seven other justices in ruling against Theresa May in January’s high-profile Supreme Court case which forced the PM to give Parliament a vote on triggering Article 50. Last year, Lady hale further burnished her liberal credentials by helping grant a double killer, who had been released from a psychiatric unit into a care home, the right to a new life because identification would ‘ harm the patient’s health and well-being’.
AND in another judgment, she assisted a married celebrity – who had arranged a threesome with another couple – to keep his identity from being reported in england and Wales. Critics claimed the ruling had serious implications for freedom of speech, since it created a precedent giving wealthy and powerful people a means to prevent legitimate scrutiny of their private lives.
One minority group who feel they have suffered at Lady hale’s hands over the years are conservative Christians.
For example, in 2014 she condemned a pair of B&B owners who had refused to let a gay couple share a double room in a Cornish hotel. Leading a panel of five Supreme Court judges, she said we should be ‘ slow to accept’ the right of people of faith to discriminate against gays on religious grounds.
Frustratingly, for a woman who is so sure of her convictions, Lady hale’s efforts to upset the old order don’t always go according to plan. Take, for example, her long fight to abolish what she called ‘silly wigs’ that women barristers have worn in court since 1922 to help them look like their male colleagues.
Consistent with her regular sniping at the male traditions of the judiciary, and her view that the judicial appointments system has been ‘ grossly unrepresentative’, she has argued that they rob women of their femininity in order to assume ‘male authority’.
however, the tradition of wearing wigs has largely survived – except in the Supreme Court, where justices have ditched many of the traditional accoutrements of court dress.
now they have a female president, proving that in today’s Britain, women of a liberal persuasion are, indeed, equal to anything.