{"id":501307,"date":"2026-03-29T05:55:25","date_gmt":"2026-03-29T05:55:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/501307\/"},"modified":"2026-03-29T05:55:25","modified_gmt":"2026-03-29T05:55:25","slug":"baroness-hale-on-being-a-trailblazer-as-the-top-judge-in-the-uk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/501307\/","title":{"rendered":"Baroness Hale on being a trailblazer as the top judge in the UK"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"A childhood picture of Baroness Hale with her sister<\/p>\n

Losing my father obviously had the immediate effect of huge grief and insecurity, wondering what was going to happen to us. There was talk of moving from the village where we had lived all our lives, and from the school that we were going to, and going down to Leeds, where my mother\u2019s mother and sister lived. I think my mother was under some pressure to do that, but she didn\u2019t want to. She wanted to retain her independence, which is why she did what she did. And\u00a0I think in the long term, it taught both me and my younger sister the importance of education, of qualifications, of retaining one\u2019s independence as much as one could.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Read more:<\/p>\n

I wanted to do very well at school. I wanted to go to university. This was an ambition that our parents had for all three of us, preferably Oxford or Cambridge. That was undoubtedly my ambition, and that\u2019s what I was working so hard to achieve. I didn\u2019t really know what I wanted in terms of a career. But I suggested law, not knowing very much about law. And instead of discouraging me, because very few girls went into the law, my head teacher said, \u201cOh, that\u2019s a good idea. Let\u2019s go with that.\u201d And it turned out to be a very good idea.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The younger me would be\u00a0astonished, absolutely flabbergasted, at the career that I have managed to have. Yes, getting to Cambridge was a\u00a0big ambition. I managed to do that. I didn\u2019t think I would do particularly well, because I had been a big fish in a small pond of a girls\u2019 high school in a small town in North Yorkshire. So I thought I would sort of be trundling along in the middle or below the middle when I got to Cambridge. But it turned out I was very good at law, and I got a\u00a0very good degree. So off I went and had a career which I would not have dreamt of when I was 16.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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The younger me couldn\u2019t imagine herself being the top judge in the United Kingdom. That would be a ridiculous thing\u00a0to be imagining, because at that stage, there were no full-time women judges. In 1961\u00a0there was the odd part-time judge, but no full-time one. So the idea would have been pretty outrageous. I assumed I\u00a0would become a solicitor, possibly in my hometown, possibly somewhere else in North Yorkshire. \u00a0<\/p>\n

I practised as a barrister and taught law at the University of Manchester for a\u00a0few years. Then I decided to concentrate on the university for a variety of good reasons. Everything I did as an academic lawyer got me a public appointment of one sort or another. For example, my first book was on mental health law,\u00a0and that got me an appointment presiding over mental health review tribunals, which decide whether people should stay detained in psychiatric hospitals. And then\u00a0another book that I wrote got me invited to apply to become a\u00a0member of the Law Commission. Then I moved to London and after nine years, they invited me to become a High Court judge. Then I had five\u00a0years in the Court of Appeal,\u00a0and then I was promoted to the top court in the\u00a0United Kingdom.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\"\"Lord Mance with Baroness Hale on the day she\u2019s sworn in as the first female president of the Supreme Court. Image: Gavin Rodgers \/ Alamy<\/p>\n

I married for the first time in 1968, before I started at the\u00a0bar. I was teaching at Manchester University, and one\u00a0of my reasons for not continuing as a barrister was that we wanted a family, and it\u2019s much easier to combine university teaching with having a family. Although there are many wonderful women who do\u00a0manage to do that, we decided that it would be better if I stuck with the university. And\u00a0so, I had a daughter in 1973. I\u2019m very proud of my daughter. She is now the CEO of the London Stock Exchange. She\u2019s had a pretty successful career, and she\u2019s still got, I\u2019m sure, a way to go. I didn\u2019t have any more children for health reasons.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It is hard to work and bring up children. You have to learn to be very efficient about everything. We were very lucky. We did have, to begin with, a nanny who lived in during the week; went home at weekends. She left when my daughter was\u00a0two, and then we had somebody who came in during the day to look after her when she got home from school, and then I got home in time for bedtime. And of course, I spent as much time as I could working from home, which is another reason for being a university teacher, because one could put one\u2019s teaching into two or three days and therefore spend the rest of the time working from home. My daughter always says\u00a0that one of her earliest memories is going to sleep to the sound of my typewriter.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"Image: Kevin Leighton<\/p>\n

I\u2019m proud of all sorts of things that I managed to achieve. I\u2019m proud of some of the legislation that was passed as a result of our efforts at the Law Commission \u2013 the Children Act 1989 is the major example of that. Getting to one\u2019s feet in court when you\u2019re starting out is pretty testing, because you\u2019re always worried that you\u2019ll do the wrong thing, forget to ask the right question, and ask the wrong question, all of those sorts of things. It\u2019s very in your face, being a barrister. You can put a foot wrong and harm your case in a way that you really didn\u2019t mean to do. And then as a\u00a0judge, some cases are not too difficult to decide, but you\u2019ve got to do them right. Some cases are very difficult to decide because there is no easy answer. So it\u2019s been testing pretty well all the way.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The surprise to me, I have to say, is reaching the age of 81, because only one of our grandparents reached the age of 80. As I said, my father died when he was 49, my mother died when she was 73. We\u2019re not a long-lived family, so it\u2019s a matter of enormous surprise to me that I\u2019m still here. \u00a0<\/p>\n

If I could have one last conversation with anyone it would be my mother. She died before the major successes in my life. And I think she would like to know how all her children\u2019s lives have progressed after her death. I\u2019ve\u00a0had a pretty amazing life, and I\u2019d want to have her reaction to it, to see what she thought about it. She was very encouraging to her children, but she wasn\u2019t uncritical. So there may be things that she would want to say in return, which would be interesting.\u00a0<\/p>\n

There are loads of times I\u2019ve been incredibly happy. I was incredibly happy on my 81st birthday recently [31 January], and I had a lunch party with some of my dearest friends and family, and we all had a lovely time. I\u2019ve had quite a life.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

With the Law on Our Side<\/a> by Lady Hale is out now (Vintage, \u00a325). <\/p>\n

You can buy it from the\u00a0Big Issue shop<\/a>\u00a0on bookshop.org, which helps to support Big Issue and independent bookshops.<\/p>\n

Do you have a story to tell or opinions to share about this?\u00a0Get in touch and tell us more<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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Subscribe to the magazine<\/a>\u00a0or\u00a0support our work with a monthly gift<\/a>. Your support helps vendors earn, learn and thrive while strengthening our frontline services.<\/p>\n

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Thank you for standing with Big Issue vendors.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A childhood picture of Baroness Hale with her sister Losing my father obviously had the immediate effect of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":501308,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[7513,59,57,58,1952,1215,175983,50,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-501307","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-united-kingdom","8":"tag-from-the-magazine","9":"tag-gb","10":"tag-great-britain","11":"tag-greatbritain","12":"tag-interview","13":"tag-law","14":"tag-letter-to-my-younger-self","15":"tag-news","16":"tag-uk","17":"tag-united-kingdom","18":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/501307","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=501307"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/501307\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/501308"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=501307"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=501307"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=501307"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}