Spider Woman: A Life – by the former President of the Supreme Court

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In October 2021 she unveiled a blue plaque in honour of Helena Normanton on 22 Mecklenburgh Square in London, saying " Helena Normanton was the pioneer of female barristers. Her father, mother and grandfather were all headteachers, and she was, in Boris Johnson’s philistine phrase which she repeats with scorn, a girly swot, who passed the 11+, went to grammar school, and won an exhibition to Cambridge. In June 2013, she was appointed Deputy President of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom to succeed Lord Hope of Craighead.

Spider Woman by Lady Hale | Waterstones

Principle and Pragmatism in Developing Private Law': 2019 Cambridge Freshfields Lecture - the Global Herald". After the House of Lords became the UK Supreme Court, she went on to become its first woman President. Hale was one of six women in her class, which had 110 men, and graduated with a starred first and top of her class in 1966. On 7 March 2019, Hale delivered the University of Cambridge Freshfields law lecture, which she entitled "Principle and Pragmatism in Developing Private Law".But mostly they have no need to be so vocal – so that agenda remains hidden and, no doubt for many, quite unconscious. She smiled through moments where her gender unnecessarily became the forefront and calmly requested changes to be made. While there is much to marvel at in Brenda Hale’s list of achievements, this Spider Woman has no need of the superpowers of her comic book namesake.

Spider Woman by Lady Hale review — all rise: the Beyoncé of

Growing up in Scorton in North Yorkshire, where her father was the head of the boys’ grammar school, she was both of the village, and slightly apart from it, marked out by her cleverness (“a swot and a goody-goody”). She served as a Law Lord until 2009 when she, along with the other Law Lords, transferred to the new Supreme Court. Lady Hale has made history a number of times, of course – the first woman to be appointed to the supreme court, the youngest and first female commissioner to be appointed to the Law Commission.As a student, she was inspired to read law by her studies of 17th century history and the constitutional battles of kings, courts and Parliament. This, more than any single constitutional issue, is her driving motivation, although it is so obvious to her that she rarely spells it out: to make the law accessible and responsive to people. One of these, former barrister Afua Hirsch, has turned her into the heroine of a children’s book, Equal to Everything: Judge Brenda and the Supreme Court. Overall the book acts as a very interesting insight into both legal and social changes over more than half a century. I was cross that they did not seem to understand what we were proposing and that it was not as they portrayed.

Spider Woman bites back - The New European The Spider Woman bites back - The New European

Along the way she is one of a small number of women at Cambridge, an academic in Manchester, the first female law commissioner and thereafter (along with Lady Butler Sloss) making waves and paving the way for women in the highest judicial roles in the country.In 1999, Hale followed Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss to become only the second woman to be appointed to the Court of Appeal (styled The Right Honourable Lady Justice Hale), entering the Privy Council at the same time. I was thinking about other things – is my summary accurate enough, is it complete enough, how are we going to get through the day, are there going to be riots – not about spiders.

Spider Woman by Lady Hale - Signed Edition - Coles Books Spider Woman by Lady Hale - Signed Edition - Coles Books

Two years earlier, she became the first woman and youngest person to be appointed to the Law Commission, overseeing a number of important reforms [11] in family law during her nine years with the commission. In October 2020, after China imposing a controversial national security law on Hong Kong, Hale expressed her concerns about hearing cases in Hong Kong: "I have never sat and it has not been arranged at least for me to sit . By coincidence, I am also obsessed with the civil war, but if I were going to take career inspiration from it, it wouldn’t make me a lawyer; they came out of the whole thing quite poorly, I thought. Hale deals with her divorce in just one Pollyanna-ish sentence, and with the death of her second husband, Julian Farrand, in July 2020 (just months into her retirement), in only a very few more – an approach that had me swinging between gobsmacked admiration and utter bewilderment. Although that ends the formal section dealing with the Prorogation Case, one of the topical essays in the final section deals with Constitutional Law, and is written by Aidan O’Neill QC who was counsel for the respondents in the government’s appeal in Cherry v Advocate General for Scotland (Lord Advocate intervening) , joined with Miller 2 in the Prorogation Case hearing.

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