One
highlight of my time as Liverpool Law Society President was when we welcomed
Baroness Hale of Richmond to deliver our Conkerton
Memorial Lecture on the subject of the Independence
of the Judiciary. Lady Hale is the most senior woman judge that we have ever
had in England and Wales. She was
recently named the fourth most powerful woman in the UK in a recent BBC poll –
During her time with us I found her to be both charming and
down to earth as well as having an intellect the size on Mount
Everest!
I mention her for two reasons; firstly because I am a shameless
name dropper and secondly because she is the ideal person to speak on judicial
diversity. We are rightly proud of our courts system but when it comes to
diversity we are lagging well behind the rest. In a recent lecture Lady Hale
has pointed out that, across Europe, the
male/female split on the bench is close to 50/50. But in the UK the
percentage of women is just 23% -
“England
and Wales is fourth from the
bottom, followed only by Azerbaijan,
Scotland and Armenia".
Other groups are even less well represented – only 4.5% of
High Court judges are from an ethnic minority background. Lady Hale herself is
the only woman in the Supreme Court - indeed she is the only woman there has
ever been in that Court or its predecessor The House of Lords! One third of the
US Supreme Court Justices are women.
We do of course need to ensure that the best people become the
top judges. But we also need a judiciary which represents all of those in
society. I have mentioned before that we need judges from as wide a grouping as
possible. The male, pale and stale image is outdated and frankly embarrassing in
a multicultural world.
Lady Hale has brought the possibility of positive
discrimination back on to the agenda to ensure a balanced representation. I
would agree that the time for such measures has probably arrived. That is not
to say that there should be any lowering of standards but amongst those who are
qualified to serve on the bench we should do all we can to balance out the
numbers and catch up with the rest of the modern world.
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