Baroness Hale: This is Your Life

Baroness Hale: This is Your Life
Interviewed by Professor Dame Hazel Genn

About this event

In this special event Professor Dame Hazel Genn explored with Baroness Hale the highlights of her career to date and her thoughts on the future.

This event looked in particular at the importance of the judiciary for equal societies, how we can tackle structural inequalities and will reflect on:

• breaking the glass ceiling (as Britain’s first female law lord; the first woman to serve on the UK’s Supreme Court; and the first to become its President);  
• the importance of diversity and inclusion within the judiciary and society;
• the importance of the rule of law for breaking down inequalities and delivering justice;
• a high point in Baroness Hale’s career and her hopes for the future of the judiciary;
• current preoccupations; and
• what advice she would give to scholars at the start of their careers.

About Baroness Hale

As an honorary professor at UCL, Baroness Hale plays a part in research, teaching, and public engagement in the Faculty of Laws, particularly in her areas of interest such as women’s rights, access to justice, and the rule of law.

Baroness Hale retired in early 2020 as President of the UK Supreme Court, the United Kingdom’s most senior judge. She was educated at Richmond High School for Girls in North Yorkshire and Girton College, Cambridge (where she is now Visitor) and was called to the Bar by Gray’s Inn in 1969. She taught Law at Manchester University for 18 years, specialising in family and social welfare law, and also practised for a while at the Manchester Bar.

In 1984 she became the first woman to serve on the Law Commission, a statutory body which promotes the reform of the law. There she led the work which resulted (among others) in the Children Act 1989 and the Mental Capacity Act 2005. She was also a founder member of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority and chair of its Code of Practice Committee from 1990 to 1994. In 1994, she was appointed a Judge of the Family Division of the High Court and promoted to the Court of Appeal of England and Wales in 1999. In 2004 she became the first woman ‘Lord of Appeal in Ordinary’ in the House of Lords, which was then the top court for the whole United Kingdom. In 2009, she transferred with the other ‘Law Lords’ to become a Justice of the newly established Supreme Court of the United Kingdom. She became Deputy President of the Court in 2013 and its President in 2017.