 Baroness Hale, guests, alumni. On behalf of the many staff and students here tonight, I'd like to offer you all a very warm welcome. Say how honored we are that everyone of you have joined us this evening. Or at least of course Lady Hale, whose judgments and judgment have been so critical in the still fledgling development of the Supreme Court. You join us at an exciting time in our history, as so as stands on the cusp of next year's centenary. Many of you would have seen the building site, upstairs to my right, soon to become the School of Law's new home, as the only academic department in the renovated north wing of Senate House. A location offering both stimulating activities and quiet study that will provide our students with cutting-edge learning facilities in a 21st century law school that retains a long and proud history of innovation and creativity. Whilst, others of you will on the ground floor directly above have seen the occupation, in what was to be the site of this evening's post-lecture reception. As I say, exciting times, in which our staff, including our cleaners, and the students are fully engaged in vigorous debate, to turn the various opportunities that confront us. It's what makes so as such a diverse, stimulating, occasionally maddening, but always compelling place to study and to work. I often tell people, let's be frank, I go on about it all the time, that we have a first School of Global Law, by which I'm stating not only an historical truth, but a future aspiration, as we confront the issues, both opportunities and threats of globalization in a world where parochial lawyers concerned only with their own system of law, do neither their clients nor their profession proud. Whether your practice is in family or corporate, human rights or IP, you cannot serve their needs without a transnational perspective, the awareness of the law beyond your particular border. The SOA School of Law has always punched above its weight, or in the vernacular of the age had impact, which technically is defined under the ref as changing the behavior of a non-academic audience. Be that for example, the scholarship of Lynn Welchman, whose work on the definition of honor crimes has changed the practices of policymakers, NGOs and police forces, not to mention academics in Britain and beyond. Or the extensive studies of Sammy Urbano, who have somewhat to her surprise, been cited extensively in the new count extremes strategy launched by David Cameron on Tuesday, which despite her initial shock, if not horror, provides Sammy with a real opportunity to influence thinking for the good in this particularly febrile and potentially explosive area of policymaking in a forthcoming meeting with ministers charged with developing the policy. But enough of us. The real star of tonight shows Baroness Hale. To be honest, nothing sounds about better than the text conversation we had just an hour ago. Baroness Hale, Paul, where do you want me to arrive? I don't know where the main SOAS building is. Paul, sorry, Brenda, the postcode for your driver is WC8-1-H-O-X-G. Baroness Hale, no driver, I'm coming by tube. After leaving Cambridge with a start first, Brenda joined the University of Manchester as an assistant lecturer, also becoming a member of Grey's Inn and predictably topping the list in the bar final exams. Spending most of her time in academia whilst working part-time as a barrister, she soon rose to become a professor of family law at Manchester before joining the Law Commission as its first woman and youngest commissioner and introducing many important family law reforms, including the transformation of divorce law. After the Law Commission, Brenda joined the judiciary simply rising to the House of Lords before being appointed as deputy president of the Supreme Court some two years ago. Baroness Hale's contribution in the House of Lords and Supreme Court has been marked by groundbreaking leading judgements and brilliant dissents. She has made dull property lawyers such as myself question the assumptions of what sometimes transmutes into the dry calculus of property law in her leading judgements in cases such as Stackendown and Jones and Curnard. Her powerful dissent in Nicholson would have deemed the Suicide Act incompatible with Article 8 and forced Parliament to legislate on the issue of euthanasia. Whilst in Begum, she demonstrated the need to hear multiple voices and addressing issues of choice concerning Muslim women and communities. One could go on and on, but I risk embarrassing her. I know Brenda from my time as a lowly research assistant at the Law Commission where she'd always spend a while every afternoon talking with us at sea, which occurred somewhat ritualistically at 3pm each afternoon. To be honest, we were initially somewhat scared of these encounters where Brenda was always kind and patient, listened to her ill-formed ideas. Admittedly, she was never one to fight shy of showing us where our analysis broke down, but she did so with warmth and humanity, for she is in truth a natural teacher and I know we will all learn much this evening. Ladies and gentlemen, it's my honour to present to you, Baroness Hale. Thank you very much indeed, Paul, both for the invitation and the flattering introduction. I'm afraid I can't resist giving you another bit of that email exchange that we had earlier today. When I said, Paul, I don't know where so-as is, because I've never been here before. That's why I said yes to come. He said, it's in the northeast corner of Russell Square. So I thought, that's a bit odd. I don't think there's anything in the northeast corner of Russell Square that could possibly be so-as. And then a few minutes later, I got another email saying, sorry, my geography's all to pot, northwest corner. So that was a great relief to me and I found you and I'm here and I'm really glad to be here. Thank you. So I thought I'd talk about life in the Supreme Court. Some of you will know everything I'm going to say. I hope a few of you don't. So firstly, what are we? We are the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom, not just England and Wales, but Scotland and Northern Ireland too. This is confusing because the High Court and the Court of Appeal of England and Wales used to call themselves the Supreme Court and they had to change the Supreme Court Act to be the Senior Courts Act in order to accommodate us. Paul rolled them. So that's what we are. Why are we? We are the apex court of the United Kingdom, which used to be the Appellate Committee of the House of Lords. The Law Lords were full members of the House of Lords. We were allowed to take part in the parliamentary business if we wanted to. In 2000, before I joined, the Law Lords reiterated that that's what they were allowed to do, but when deciding whether they would take part in parliamentary business, they'd have two things in mind. One was as cross-benchers, it was not proper for them to take part in matters of strong party political controversy. And the other was they should bear in mind that by taking part in a political debate or debate on a matter of legislation, they might disable themselves from actually sitting on a case connected with it. So most people observed that. Two of my brethren voted against the hunting bill. You will know that the hunting bill took up more parliamentary time in the last but one administration, the Labour administration, than any other piece of legislation. And they voted against it. That meant they couldn't sit on any of the three wonderful cases that we had about the Hunting Act. The Jackson case, which constitutional lawyers will know all about, and one which said that its contents were contrary to human rights, and another which said that its contents were contrary to EU law. So it did seem a rather anomalous position for us to be in. Of course, also, the Lord Chancellor was technically the presiding member of the Law Lords, and he was not only the Speaker of the House of Lords, but he was a senior member of the government. So that didn't seem to be right either. And there was an inappropriate blurring between making laws and interpreting and applying them. And on top of all that, the facilities were not ideal for us. We didn't have enough room, although we had far more than everybody else had, which meant that they didn't have enough room. And so the House of Lords getting bigger and bigger, it's got still bigger since we left. I had my room next door to one of the parliamentarians' rooms. Same size as mine. There was one of me and four of them, just to illustrate that we took up space that they could ill afford. So where are we now? We are ideally situated on Parliament Square. I think it should be called Constitution Square because the four pillars of the Constitution are ranged around the Square. We've got the Houses of Parliament on one side. We've got the most powerful Department of Government, the Treasury, on the other side. We've got the Supreme Court on our side and we've got God and the Queen on the Westminster Abbey side. The only interloper is the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors. So there we go. We have a lovely old building, which we very much hope that people will come and visit. We get a lot of student groups around. We get a lot of casual visitors in off the Square. They just potter in and think, yeah, what's going on here? Can I go in? Oh, yes, I can go in. I have friendly, welcoming people on a desk and they can potter into the courtroom while we're sitting. And it's lovely. We like it a lot. So there's much better public access, much better facilities for the lawyers and the judges, much better facilities for students, school and other visits, and events like Moots, of which we have quite a lot, and much greater transparency. We are filmed. We were the first court in the country where it was lawful for us to be filmed. All our proceedings have been recorded on film since we began in 2009. We take the cameras for granted, so we behave just as badly as we always did. Then they took to webcasting it live so people could watch our proceedings live at a distance. And now you can even go back into the archive and look at the past hearings. So if you are a really sad person who hasn't enough to do and likes watching, not quite paint dry, but the sort of debates that go on in the Supreme Court, do tune in. You can do it. We do give all of our judgments when we hand them down. We do a little piece. We call it the piece to camera, but it's not really a piece to camera. Wednesday mornings, which goes out on YouTube and you can look at all of those for quite a long way back now. When we try and explain in words that make sense to members of the public, so they're very simple for law students and ridiculously simple for proper lawyers. But it is something that we like to do because people can see what our decisions are. And above all, the biggest thing that we've got out of the new building is three courtrooms. That's very significant, I'll come back to it later. So who are we? So far, so good. There are 12 justices. 11 men and me. Most of them went to independent schools and indeed most of them went to boys' boarding schools. I only lived in one because my father was headmaster of one. Most went to Oxford and Cambridge. Most made their careers at the bar, usually smart bar in London or in the case of the Celtic Fringe in Edinburgh or Belfast. I call them the quadrangle to quadrangle to quadrangle boys. Because that's the life they led. All of us, of course, are white British, although we do have our Celtic quota to which I'll return. So I am indifferent in all but two respects. I went to a non-fee-paying state school. I grew up in rural North Yorkshire. My parents were school teachers. No legal tradition in my family. I was the first from my family to, first from my school, let alone my family, to go into the law, the first to go to Cambridge. When I graduated, I didn't go to the bar. I went to teach law at Manchester. That's because I didn't fancy the London Bar or the Magic Surfer Firmers Listers that very kindly offered me their first articles to a woman. But I went to Manchester to teach because they said, please, qualify as a barrister and do some practice part-time. We think that will be good for you and good for the students that academics should know something about practice. That's a bit of a thing in the past, isn't it? But there we go. But of course it was possible then because access to the legal profession was a great deal easier than it is now. I did not have to go and spend £17,000 spending a year at bar school. I could do it by a self-tuition home tuition course. So I got a series of nutshells and model papers and model answers from the College of Law and I studied in my Garrett over the first long vac after I'd been teaching and I passed the bar exams. Well, that shows you how easy the bar exams were. But it did mean that people like me could qualify, which I think was a good thing. So there we are. So in all respects, other than being white and having been to Cambridge, I am different from my colleagues. Now why does it matter that the Supreme Court is such a non-diverse group of people? It is widely believed, especially amongst our higher judiciary, that our higher judiciary is admired the world over. For their intelligence, their industry, their independence, their integrity and their incorruptibility. Well, I think that's all right. They have all of those qualities. So why change? Won't it do more harm than good? Well, I think there are three main reasons why it matters. Legitimacy, equity and difference. Legitimacy is about the confidence of the public and parliament and the government that the judiciary is reflective of the whole population and not just a narrow elite section of it. The law is being applied and developed not by one small elite group but by people who have a wider understanding of society. Equity is about recognizing the abilities of all those able, young women, people from ethnic minorities who've been coming into the law in numbers equal to or greater than the men for decades now. Also people from socially less advantaged groups. And also all those able lawyers who for one reason or another found independent practice at the bar or in a magic circle for the solicitors, not for them but are still just as capable of being judges as the more traditional sort. And then the third reason is difference. Differences about making a difference to the way cases are actually decided especially at the higher levels. And that can be illustrated by the sorts of cases that we do in our court. Come on to that in a minute. So what do we do? We hear appeals in civil and criminal cases from England, Wales and Northern Ireland. We hear appeals in civil cases from Scotland. We don't hear appeals in criminal cases from Scotland because it wasn't in the act of union. And nobody's done anything about it since. And Scottish criminal law is of course so idiosyncratic that nobody else can understand it. I would have thought that would be a good reason for allowing appeals out of Scotland but that's not the way they feel about it. Quite the reverse. We also hear devolution cases from Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, i.e. cases that allege that the devolved parliaments and governments of those three parts of the United Kingdom have not acted within the powers that the UK Parliament has given them. For most of the cases that we do, permission to appeal is required. And in granting permission to appeal, the criterion is, is it a point of law, an arguable point of law of general public importance and a case in which it's appropriate for the Supreme Court to look at it. And the sorts of cases we do are the range of cases, well exemplified by the ones I took away with me to either think about or write about over the summer of 2014. We had, firstly, a Scottish devolution case. Was the act of the Scottish Parliament defining the franchise for the referendum valid law? Because it repeated the ban on any prisoners voting. Which, of course, the European Court of Human Rights had said was wrong, contrary to the European Convention. And the Scottish Parliament is not allowed to legislate contrary to the Convention rights. So that sounds like quite a good point, doesn't it? It could have set aside the whole referendum. We could have said, no, you'll have to think again. Actually, they would have done. I mean, they would have cured it very quickly. However, we decided that the European Convention did not apply to referenda, so it was all right. So that was number one case. Number two case, we had a Welsh devolution case. They had passed a bill requiring employers and their insurers to pay the cost of NHS treatment for asbestos-related diseases for which the employers were responsible. Was that within the powers of the Welsh Assembly? The Welsh Assembly has powers to legislate for funding for the NHS. So was charging employers and their insurers funding for the NHS? How many of you think it was? Oh, sorry lot. How many of you think it wasn't? Come on. Equally sorry lot. No comeback if you get it right or wrong. I asked all these questions in St Andrew's last week. They all answered. Mostly got it wrong. How many think it was? How many think it wasn't? How many have read the case? That's okay then. Well, by a majority of three to two, the Supreme Court held that it wasn't. I was in the two as was the Lord Chief Justice who happens to be Welsh. There we go. It's a very serious jurisdiction that because the law officers can refer to the Supreme Court a bill which has been through the devolved parliament before it gets royal assent for us to rule on whether it is or is not within scope. A really new constitutional function we've never had before. We do have other sorts of constitutional case. We had a case about whether the English courts could interfere with the process by which royal assent is given to legislation passed by a Channel Islands legislature. Could the English courts say that the government should not have advised the Queen to give her royal assent? Well, we said never say never, but not in this particular case. We shouldn't have interfered. Then we have human rights cases, of course. Could the Home Secretary interfere with the free speech rights of members of parliament by denying entry to an Iranian dissident with whom they wanted to hold a meeting in parliament? Not because she was dangerous or would say anything inflammatory, but because it might offend the Iranians who are capable of taking offence and doing nasty things if they do. Now, of course, the British government was perfectly prepared to offend the Iranians for the purpose of freezing the assets of their banks. Because that had to do with UN sanctions and EU sanctions. But they didn't want to add insult to injury by allowing this dissident to come in. That, I think, was one of the most difficult decisions that I have ever had to take because the balance between free speech and national interest was very difficult to draw, very acute, and we had to give a huge amount of respect to the government's expert judgment on that. So as a majority of four to one that held that they were entitled to do that, I was in the fall. We had a huge case, which was a public law case involving human rights, about whether the benefit cap discriminates unlawfully against lone parents who are overwhelmingly women. So is it discriminatory in the enjoyment of the convention right to protection of property, indirectly discriminatory, to impose the benefit cap? It was held by a majority of three to two that the discrimination was justified. The two held that the conflict with the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child meant that it couldn't be justified. I was in the two. I don't think that's any surprise to anybody. We had a tort law case. Can the police be larval in negligence for failing to prevent the death of a young mother at the hands of her former partner, which might have been prevented had they responded appropriately to a 999 call? The majority held no. There were two dissentients, guess who one of them was. Actually, no prizes for guessing who the other one was either because the most dissenting Supreme Court justice is our Irishman. Now, why am I not surprised by that? So we had another tort law case, which, you know, when you do tort law, you'll probably have both of them if you haven't already done it. Is it for the doctor to decide what information to give a patient about the pros and cons of a particular treatment? In particular, should a pregnant woman who is an insulin-dependent diabetic be warned of the risk of something called shoulder dystocia and discuss the pros and cons of vaginal delivery or caesarean section? Now, I think the English had thought that the answer by now was obvious and that yes, she should and yes, there should be a discussion, but in Scotland they didn't. So, fortunately, unanimously we held that there should have been this discussion, she should have been given the choice. Had she been given the choice, she would undoubtedly have chosen a caesarean and had she chosen a caesarean, the baby would not have been born with very severe disabilities as he was. It was great because it gave us the opportunity to set the law straight. We had a property law case Well, I believe that Paul will probably tell you that it was right, but it was one that some of us decided with a heavy heart. What are the rights of a person who sold her home under a so-called equity release scheme on the faith of a promise that she could continue to live there as long as she liked at a very low rent. So her mortgage which she couldn't pay got paid off and she'd actually get a lump sum at some stage and her son would be able to live there too. So in effect she was promised she could go back to what it was like to be a council tenant as she had been before she bought it under the right to buy. But this was of course a fraudulent promise. On the other side the vendor the purchaser had been borrowing money from a finance company to finance the purchase had pretended to the finance company that they hadn't made any such promise to anybody that they could live there. They did of course default on the mortgage so the finance company eventually brought possession proceedings. So you've got two innocent parties one maybe you might think more deserving than the other why aren't finance companies deserving of course they're deserving to make a living just as little old ladies have to have a home. So why does one think that? Nevertheless the law I'm afraid was pretty clear that the promise which the purchaser made could not be enforced against the land as opposed to against the purchaser as a person and enforcing it against the purchaser as a person was going to be pretty difficult because they were all bankrupt and disappeared or now so there we go very sad difficult case contract law case what about the rights of a person who's been sold a payment protection policy have not only against the seller for which there is a compensation scheme but against the finance company which took an enormous the finance company which was lending the money that she wanted to borrow took an enormous premium for the for arranging this policy and then of course added this enormous premium to the money lent nice one totally unnecessary and unsuitable policy so had she got any sort of remedy against the finance company answer yes she did for non-disclosure of this enormous commission that they were getting on this policy which had she known about it she would have realised anybody would have realised it was a very bad bargain indeed so that was more or less what I took away to think about last summer this summer not quite so varied but it did include a family law case the one in which we gave judgement last week about the effect of fraud on a order made in matrimonial financial proceedings and we also of course had some human rights and public law cases we had an international law case about whether the USA could be taken to an employment tribunal when it made civilian employees redundant when it decided to close a military base here well that's an interesting international law problem they could of course have claimed state immunity but they didn't because they thought they'd win in the employment tribunal anyway when it turned out that they weren't going to win in the employment tribunal they took all sorts of arguments out of a hat in order to try and say that they couldn't be made to pay so that one came to us that's a very interesting case and we had a prisoner's rights case was it lawful to keep a prisoner for the better part of 5 years not as punishment for anything wicked he had done in prison but for his own protection because he was such a hateful person that all the other prisoners would pile into him if he was allowed into the mainstream prison at least that was the idea so it was all about the basic the due process rights of prisoners now I've given you that list partly to give you some idea of the enormous variety and fascination of the cases that we have the privilege of trying to decide none of them is easy because they wouldn't be with us if they were easy but you may find it interesting that in that list there is not a single criminal case not a single ordinary criminal law case we do get them from time to time but we don't get very many and of course most people when they first come to study law think the law's all about the criminal law it isn't there's all the stuff I've just been telling you about we do get some criminal cases from the judicial committee of the Privy Council which is still the final court of appeal for the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man the few British overseas territories like Gibraltar and Bermuda and the British Virgin Islands Cayman Islands, Turks and Caicos Islands that sort of set and some independent Commonwealth countries have been on independence felt they were too small to set up their own Supreme Court and so still come to the Privy Council the largest of those is Trinidad and Tobago but we've also got Jamaica and Mauritius and the Bahamas and some others fascinating jurisdiction we see a lot of lovely people quite different we are not the same people we're not the same institution we're the flag of the country from which the appeal comes to make it absolutely plain that we are not the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom when we're sitting on the judicial committee of the Privy Council and we also put down the Privy Council rug just to demonstrate it's not the Supreme Court anyway and next week in fact we are having a Supreme Court case and a Privy Council case being heard together by the Supreme Court Enterprise and participation in criminal enterprises I'm not quite sure whether we should have the rug down or not perhaps we should have it halfway across we'll have to discuss this waiting item so what do we not do unlike Supreme Courts in most of the rest of the world we have no power to strike down acts of Parliament the sovereignty of Parliament that Parliament, the UK Parliament can make or un-make any law there are two qualifications to that the first is the European Communities Act which for as long as it's on the statute book has provided for the supremacy of European Union law within the fields within which it operates so we have a duty to interpret UK legislation so that it conforms to European Union law and if we can't interpret it so that it conforms to European Union law we have to ignore it so that's pretty extreme doesn't often happen but it does from time to time we also have of course the European Convention on Human Rights but that does not allow us to strike down acts of Parliament the most we can do is incompatibility and a declaration of incompatibility leaves it to Parliament to decide what if anything to do about it the amazing thing is that of the I think there are now 20 extent declarations of incompatibility since the Human Rights Act came into force all but one of them that did require some remedial action has been remedied very very good of Government and Parliament what's the one exception prisoners voting quite right it makes the Prime Minister physically sick so there we go but of course it raises an interesting question for us on which the Court has a certain amount of difference of opinion if the matter is one which Strasberg Court would say was within the Marginal Appreciation left to the Member State the United Kingdom what do we do do we say okay it's within the Marginal Appreciation of the Member State so we're not going to do anything about it we'll leave that to Parliament or do we say no Parliament has given us this task of deciding what is and is not in violation of the Convention Rights so we'll decide that it's up to Parliament whether to do anything about it so in the recent case on assisted suicide the Nicholson case five of us said yes we can if it's a proper case to do so we can make a declaration of incompatibility and then Parliament can take it or leave it four of them said no this is very much a matter for Parliament and we are not going to interfere so we have all of those sorts of interesting questions about where we stand in relation to both Government and Parliament on these particular issues but why have a Supreme Court at all if we can't behave like the Supreme Court everywhere else in the world what use are we well we do have a constitutional role as I've explained in respect to the Constitution of the United Kingdom which is an extremely complicated constitution many of the laws in the United Kingdom are UK-wide laws they apply particularly throughout Great Britain both in Scotland, Wales and England some of them apply in Northern Ireland as well so obviously they need to have uniform interpretation throughout the United Kingdom and the other big excuse for us is that we take far fewer cases than the other courts do we have much more time to think about them, to discuss them and consider them fully read around them do a bit of extra research possibly but that's very dangerous so you have to be careful about it the great strength is supposed to be our collective wisdom three minds in the Court of Appeal are better than one in the Trial Court five minds in the Supreme Court are better than three in the Court of Appeal and in important cases we can go up to seven or nine but of course because we have the three courtrooms we now have the space to do that whenever we want to do so probably the most important practical effect of our move from the House of Lords was that we have sat seven or nine in far more cases than we did when we were in the House of Lords how about that? geography matters but of course there is little point in adding to the numbers of minds if they all think alike the whole idea about several minds being better is that out of the attrition of diverse minds comes something stronger and better than the individuals could ever produce by themselves and diverse minds to my mind includes not only diversity of legal philosophies but also diversity of gender ethnicity social and professional background and that's why I think it's so important that the people deciding these hugely interesting and difficult cases should be more diverse than they currently are but we can take comfort in the way in which we are different from some Supreme Courts elsewhere in the world the appointments to our Supreme Court are not made on party political lines I do not know what parties my brethren vote for although I can make a very good guess in some cases there we go that's all I had to say but you can ask me whatever you want I don't promise to answer