Diversity has been a popular topic with the profession, notes Roger Smith
No doubt as to the legal theme of the last month: diversity and difference were to the fore.
Hale & in great heart
Lady Hale did not reach her position as the sole woman at the top of the judicial tree without a degree of steel in her soul. So, no surprise that she let a fellow justice of the Supreme Court have it with both barrels in her Kuttan Menon Lecture. Lord Sumption had argued in his Bar Council lecture of November last year that the gender imbalance of the superior courts would be corrected only by the effluxion of time. He conceded that this was not ideal but it was inevitable, given the overwhelming requirement to appoint “on merit” (the statutory requirement) and the scarcity of suitably qualified women candidates.
Lord Sumption accepted, interestingly enough, that women have a unique experience of the world that would be useful in judicial determination. However, it was wrong to argue “because a particular kind of experience is specific to one gender,
