Brenda Marjorie Hale, Baroness Hale of Richmond, (born 31 January 1945), is a British judge who served as President of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom from 2017 until her retirement in 2020.
In 2004, she joined the House of Lords as a Lord of Appeal in Ordinary. She is the only woman to have been appointed to that position. She served as a Law Lord until 2009 when she, along with the other Law Lords, transferred to the new Supreme Court as a result of the Constitutional Reform Act 2005. She served as Deputy President of the Supreme Court from 2013 to 2017.
Lady Hale became a non-permanent judge of the Court of Final Appeal of Hong Kong in 2018. In June 2021, she announced her decision not to seek reappointment on the Hong Kong court after the end of her term in July, mentioning the impact of the controversial Hong Kong national security law.
In 2019, Lady Hale was appointed an Honorary Professor of Law at University College London. Hale has also been Honorary President of the Cambridge University Law Society since 2015.
On 11 January 2020, Lady Hale was succeeded by Lord Reed of Allermuir as President of the Supreme Court.
In 2021, Hale became an honorary fellow of Mansfield College, Oxford.
In 2022, Lady Hale was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Law by the University of Chichester.
Brenda Marjorie Hale was born on 31 January 1945 in Leeds, West Riding of Yorkshire. Both her parents were headteachers. She has two sisters. Hale lived in Redcar until the age of three when she moved with her parents to Richmond, North Yorkshire. She was educated at the Richmond High School for Girls (now part of Richmond School), where she and her two sisters were all head girls. She later studied at Girton College, Cambridge (the first from her school to attend Cambridge), where she read law. 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.
After becoming an assistant law lecturer at the Victoria University of Manchester (now the University of Manchester) in 1966 and lecturer in 1968, she was called to the Bar by Gray's Inn in 1969, topping the list in the bar finals for that year.
Working part-time as a barrister, Hale spent 18 years mostly in academia, becoming Reader in 1981 and Professor of Law at Manchester in 1986. Two years earlier, she became the first woman and youngest person to be appointed to the Law Commission, overseeing a number of important reforms in family law during her nine years with the commission. In 1989, she was appointed Queen's Counsel.
Lady Hale was appointed a recorder (a part-time circuit judge) in 1989, and in 1994 became a judge in the Family Division of the High Court of Justice (styled The Honourable Mrs Justice Hale). Upon her appointment, as is convention, she was appointed a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE). In 1999, Lady Hale followed Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss to become only the second woman to be appointed to the Court of Appeal (styled thereafter The Right Honourable Lady Justice Hale), entering the Privy Council at the same time.
On 12 January 2004, she was appointed the first female Lord of Appeal in Ordinary and was created a life peer as Baroness Hale of Richmond, of Easby in the County of North Yorkshire. She sat in the House of Lords as a Crossbencher.
In June 2013, she was appointed Deputy President of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom to succeed Lord Hope of Craighead. In July 2017, she was appointed to be the next President of the Supreme Court, succeeding Lord Neuberger of Abbotsbury. She took office in September 2017.
In December 2018, during an interview to mark the centenary of the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act 1919, Lady Hale argued that the judiciary needed to become more diverse so that the public have greater confidence in judges. Hale called for a more balanced gender representation on the UK's highest court and swifter progress promoting those from minority ethnic backgrounds and with "less privileged lives". However, Lady Hale objected to the idea of positive discrimination because "no one wants to feel they have got the job in any way other than on their own merits".
In September 2019, Prime Minister Boris Johnson prorogued Parliament over Brexit. As President of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom, Lady Hale along with ten other Justices of the Supreme Court sitting as an enlarged panel, unanimously found that Johnson's prorogation was unlawful, terminating the suspension of Parliament. Hale described the ruling as "a source of, not pride, but satisfaction." In 2020, reaching the mandatory retirement age, Lady Hale retired from the court.
Jurisprudence and significant judgments
Lord Kerr described one of the core features of Lady Hale's judicial reasoning as "her determination to scrutinise the impact which the law has on the most vulnerable". Kerr cites a number of decisions made by the court with a focus on family law and the rights of women including In re McLaughlin, the judicial review brought by the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission concerning access to abortion, and McFarlane v Tayside Health Board. Lady Hale is a self-described feminist who was 'by far the most active' Supreme Court judge in using feminist reasoning in her judgements.. Numerous of her judgements have been described as 'feminist'.
Her 2010 judgment in Yemshaw v London Borough of Hounslow—where the court expounded a broad understanding of the word "violence" as used in the Housing Act 1996 that covered emotional abuse as well as physical assault—was subject to academic criticism for going beyond the Parliamentary intention, but also cited as an example of judicial sensitivity and foresight around the emergence of coercive control as a legally recognised category of domestic abuse.