For over a week now, JURIST has had a column called Law in Today’s Foreign Press. Today’s entry gives links, inter alia, to the Independent story on the first woman law lord in Britain (sorry, that was the Guardian link – here’s the Independent one), Dame Brenda Hale, being appointed next year (vocabulary of lords and ladies has varied over the years). Other links are to Guardian reports on trademark claims in the European Court of Justice, and a new motor vehicle law being drafted in China under which motorists would be held liable for any traffic accident with a pedestrian.
Good news after LADY Justice Hale was passed over for the Law Lords (soon to be Law Ladies?) a couple of years ago.
It was not only the UK mass media that were up in arms. The Bar Council of Eng. & Wales invited her as the top ‘keynote’ Annual Conference Speaker last year where she even queried the extreme, no-compromise adversarial nature of Eng. trial proceedings.
I know they called Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss “Lord Justice” and “My Lord” for some years until she was permitted to be called “Lady Justice”. What was she called at the High Court? I imagine it’s apocryphal that they wanted to avoid calling her “Miss Justice”?
She was called the Hon. – Rt. Hon. – in the Family Div. of the HC. In court, she should have been addressed as Your Honour, though there are Internet refs. to her as ‘Her Ladyship’. Your Worship is , I believe, the address for magistrates.
Also, as she’s married to Retd. Judge Joseph Butler-Sloss, there’d have been no point in Miss Justice. I’ve never heard of a Miss or Ms Justice, as Mrs. Justice would be the courtesy title. However, things are fluid at the moment and just about anything can happen.
BTW, she’s got – or had when I was in London – a sweet little dog she took for walks around the Temple Gardens.
She’s also reputed to be a hard ‘taskmistress’ when judging student moots at UCL, even on women students. But that, of course, is pure hearsay.
Now that there is a woman judge in the House of Lords, the day beckons when the UK will send a woman to serve on Europe’s highest court. In the light of the present discussion, I now see that this may cause some difficulty with regard to modes of address. In Ireland women have sat on the Supreme Court for several years and in 1999 Fidelma Macken, a judge of the Irish High Court, became the first ever female judge of the European Court of Justice (a French woman had served as Advocate General in the 1980s). Some time after her appointment it became necessary for a note to be placed permanently in the English booths of the ECJ in Luxembourg advising interpreters of a British persuasion to avoid referring to “lords and ladies” and that sort of thing when Judge Macken is sitting.
For in the words of Rodgers and Hammerstein:
“What ain’t we got? We ain’t got dames!”
Ciaran