Baroness Hale of Richmond, the first female president of the UK Supreme Court, begins her autobiography by listing her “impostor moments”. She also notes the many times when, “unbelievably”, she became the first woman to achieve something, from working for the Law Commission to becoming a member of the Athenaeum.
“I don’t really see myself as a trailblazer,” she writes, “and yet when I look back, of course I have done things which no woman has done before.”
Today she is at home, sitting at a table adorned with a candle printed with her face and four of her most noteworthy judgments. Her flat is walking distance from the Supreme Court — from which she retired in January 2020 — and is crammed with books, papers and a small wooden sign saying “festina lente”. Google later tells me that it is a classical motto meaning “make haste slowly”, adopted by the Emperor Augustus and the Medicis.
“I think it’s right to recognise and confess that there are moments in one’s life when one wonders whether one is going to be able to cope,” she says today of her impostor moments. “A lot of people would be surprised that someone like me has ever felt that way.”
She cites four: when she went to grammar school and then to the University of Cambridge — “I had no idea that I was going to be top of the year” — when she was appointed the first woman member of the Law Commission and when, after a career spent largely out of the courtroom, she presided over a jury trial for the first time.
She has little time for some of the trappings of the law, including wigs: “They look silly. It’s time to abolish them.” Some lawyers think that they provide welcome anonymity, however slight, against the murderer you helped to jail. “That argument has much more validity for lay magistrates than it does for anybody else because they are the first people who send someone to prison and they are the people living in the community.” Surely all lawyers are living in the community? “Some of them are,” she says opaquely, “but they have protections, I think.”
Five years ago, she suggested in a speech that senior politicians — one government, one opposition — should be on the committee that appoints, among others, the lord chief justice and members of the Supreme Court. “Thus,” she concluded, “introducing an element of democratic involvement while preserving party political neutrality.” Her suggestion came a decade after Lord Bingham, the late lord chief justice, pointed out that given the chance to question potential judges, politicians “are not going to ask if they are fond of cats”. Was she naive?
“No! They can each be as party political as they like, but if you’ve got one of each you’re balancing the contribution.” There’s one of each at prime minister’s questions, but that doesn’t exactly result in calm debate and polite consensus. “Yeah, but it could do if they’re sitting together,” she says, losing patience. “Politicians can also engage in consensus. They can do it if they feel the need.” She adds that she is not in favour of the American system, where the constitution requires the president to submit his nominations to the Senate for advice and consent.
Brenda Hale was born in 1945 and brought up in Yorkshire. She was the first girl from her grammar school to go to Cambridge, where she read law. After graduating she moved to Manchester, where she was called to the Bar in 1969 but spent the first 20 years of her career largely in academia. She has been married twice: first to John Hoggett QC, a barrister, with whom she shares a grown-up daughter, Julia, and second to Julian Farrand, a solicitor and academic, who died two years ago. In 1984 she joined the Law Commission, which promotes reform of the law. Appointed QC in 1989, she was appointed to the High Court bench of England and Wales and became the first woman to serve on the Supreme Court, where she was president from 2017 to 2020.
Her family background is, she writes in her autobiography, “undeniably” middle class: an intriguing choice of word for someone with a lawyer’s pride in the precision of her language. “There’s been a bit of a tendency to suggest humbler origins than they felt to me . . . My parents had a status in the village which was one of considerable respect.”
Status seems important to Hale. There was apparently some debate over where exactly at Gray’s Inn a portrait of her should hang. Hale says that the decision was made by others, but in the end “they decided they’d better have a portrait of me in the hall. Now that’s much more prestigious, because there are only six portraits of anybody other than Elizabethan noblemen and Queen Elizabeth. So to be one of those six was really quite something. Definitely the first woman.”
She bristles at my suggestion, while also not disagreeing with it, that she was largely unknown outside legal circles until recently. “I was very well known in legal circles, because of being the first woman that and the first woman the other.”
Her anonymity ended in 2019, when she wore an enormous spider brooch to work. It fell to the Supreme Court to decide whether the prime minister’s advice to the Queen — that parliament should be prorogued — was lawful. Hale delivered the ruling that it wasn’t. The political uproar vied for prominence with her choice of accessories, which in turn led to the title of her autobiography: Spider Woman. “It was a bit of a laugh, wasn’t it?” she says today. “I don’t feel too strongly about it.”
She does, however, feel strongly about Liz Truss’s failure to defend High Court judges, after a tabloid newspaper branded them “enemies of the people”. Truss swore an oath of office to defend the independence of the judiciary, she points out, and should have said straight away that the judges were doing their job. If they get it wrong, “the Supreme Court will tell them”. Truss is now touted as a possible successor to Boris Johnson. Serving judges are both independent and impartial and express no political views; but Hale is now retired from the Supreme Court. Would Truss be a worthy PM?
“You know perfectly well I’m not going to answer that,” she says, glinting sternly at me over her glasses. “Actually, she did much better after that decision. I think lessons were learnt.” Is the present lord chancellor, Dominic Raab, doing any better? “I don’t think he’s been put to the test.”
Having retired from the bench two years ago, she spends her time giving speeches and lectures and having more fun than she used to. We meet the day after Glastonbury. Was she there? “No, I was not. That would probably not be my idea of fun.”
She won’t comment on the criminal barristers’ strike or the Rwanda deportation policy. What she is happy to discuss is the continued presence of British judges on the Hong Kong bench, two years after the Chinese government instituted a crackdown on democracy under the new national security laws. William Hague wrote this year that “The law in Hong Kong is now at the service of arbitrary and dictatorial government . . . The association of British judges with Hong Kong is lending legitimacy to a system incompatible with our values.”
Hale was due to be sworn in in Hong Kong in February 2020, an appointment delayed because of Covid. She “quietly” decided not to take up the appointment last year, claiming today that it was because she didn’t want to be seen to kick the people and judiciary of Hong Kong in the teeth. She said then that the jury was out on how the judiciary would be able to operate the new security law.
“Well, the jury is still out on that,” she says today. Really? Media outlets are being closed down and democracy activists are being locked up. Hale glares at me impatiently. “Clearly,” she snaps, “there are retired UK judges who are still sitting as members of the final court, so they must feel that they have not yet been put in an impossible situation. I believe that it will happen in due course and I believe that if and when that does happen, they will resign. I didn’t want to be put in that position.”
We get back on track with talk of partners. Like Sheryl Sandberg, ex-Facebook and Meta COO and author of Lean In, Hale credits her husband as being crucial to her success, although she prefers a comparison with Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the American Supreme Court justice, who died in 2020. She and Bader Ginsburg had a lot in common, Hale believes: “both little, dark women — ha ha — who made their mark in the top court in the land.” She can’t remember reading a Bader Ginsburg judgment with which she disagreed and flatters herself that Bader Ginsburg would say the same of hers.
“The notorious RBG used to say that the best decision she made in her life was to marry Marty and that was right. He was a distinguished lawyer, but he was also one of the comparatively rare men of that generation who didn’t mind having a very clever and successful wife. I can say of both my husbands that they didn’t mind having a very clever and successful wife.”
Asked if she had to make any sacrifices for her career she replies: “None immediately spring to mind.” Did she have it all — career, relationship, family life? She ponders the question. “Yes,” she says finally, “I think I probably did.”