Jonathan Philip Chadwick Sumption, Lord Sumption, (born 9 December 1948), is a British author, medieval historian, barrister and former senior judge who sat on the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom between 2012 and 2018 and on the Hong Kong Court of Final Appeal between 2019 and 2024.
Sumption was sworn in as a Justice of the Supreme Court on 11 January 2012, succeeding Lawrence Collins, Baron Collins of Mapesbury. Exceptionally, he was appointed to the Supreme Court directly from the practising bar, without having been a full-time judge. He retired from the Supreme Court on 9 December 2018 upon reaching the mandatory retirement age of 70.
Sumption is well known for his role as a barrister in many legal cases. They include appearances in the Hutton Inquiry on HM Government's behalf, in the Three Rivers case, his representation of former Cabinet Minister Stephen Byers and the Department for Transport in the Railtrack private shareholders' action against the British Government in 2005, for defending HM Government in an appeal hearing brought by Binyam Mohamed, and for successfully defending Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich in a private lawsuit brought by Boris Berezovsky.
A former academic, Sumption wrote a substantial narrative history of the Hundred Years' War in five volumes. He was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2003 New Year Honours and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society (FRHistS) and a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London (FSA). In 2019, he was appointed a Fellow of the Society of Writers to His Majesty's Signet (FWS). He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (FRSL) in 2025.
Jonathan Sumption was born on 9 December 1948. He is the eldest of the four children of Anthony Sumption, a decorated naval officer and barrister, and Hilda Hedigan; their marriage was dissolved in 1979. He was educated at Eton College, where at 15 he was at the bottom of his class. He studied Medieval History at Magdalen College, Oxford, from 1967 to 1970, graduating with a first. He was elected a fellow of Magdalen College, teaching and writing books on medieval history from 1971 to 1975 before leaving to pursue a career in law. Called to the bar at the Inner Temple in 1975, he then pursued a successful legal practice in commercial law.
In the 1970s, Sumption served as an adviser to the Conservative MP and Cabinet Minister Sir Keith Joseph. In 1974, Joseph together with Margaret Thatcher, founded the Centre for Policy Studies to act as a think tank for the Conservative Party. Sumption became one of its earliest employees, working as a speechwriter for Joseph. Sumption and Joseph co-wrote a 1979 book, Equality, seeking to show that "no convincing arguments for an equal society have ever been advanced" and that "no such society has ever been successfully created".
In the late 1970s, Sumption was a regular contributor to The Sunday Telegraph.
Sumption joined Brick Court Chambers in 1975, where he remained for the entirety of his commercial legal career as a barrister. He was appointed Queen's Counsel (QC) in 1986 at the relatively young age of 38, and elected a bencher of the Inner Temple in 1991. He has served as a Deputy High Court Judge in the Chancery Division, and a Judge of the Court of Appeal of Jersey and the Guernsey Court of Appeal. In 2005, Sumption became joint head of Brick Court Chambers. He was a member of the Judicial Appointments Commission until his appointment to the Supreme Court.
On 30 November 2007, when a practising barrister, Sumption successfully represented himself before Mr Justice Collins in a judicial review application in the Administrative Court concerning proposed development near his home at Greenwich.
The Guardian once described him as being a member of the "million-a-year club", the elite group of barristers earning over a million pounds a year. In a letter to The Guardian in 2001, he compared his "puny £1.6 million a year" to the vastly larger amounts that comparable individuals in business, sports and entertainment are paid.
For a four-week trial (and all the preparatory work) in the UK in 2005 he charged £800,000 to represent HM Government in the largest class action in the UK, brought by 49,500 private shareholders of the collapsed national railway infrastructure company Railtrack.
Sumption earned £7.8 million for his defence of Roman Abramovich in the 2012 case Berezovsky v Abramovich. This is believed to be the highest fee ever earned in British legal history.
On 4 May 2011, Sumption's appointment as a Justice of the Supreme Court was announced. Upon his subsequent swearing-in on 11 January 2012, he assumed the judicial courtesy title of Lord Sumption pursuant to a royal warrant (by which all members of the Supreme Court, even if they do not hold a peerage title, are accorded the style of "lord" for life).
Sumption was sworn of the Privy Council on 14 December 2011 in advance of his joining the Court, whose Justices also serve as members of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. He retired from the Supreme Court on 9 December 2018.
Sumption is the first lawyer appointed to the Supreme Court without previously serving as a full-time judge since its inception in 2009. There were only five such appointments as Law Lords to the Court's predecessor, the Appellate Committee of the House of Lords. Two were Scots lawyers: Lord Macmillan in 1930 and Lord Reid in 1948; the others were Lord Macnaghten (1887), Lord Carson (1921) and Lord Radcliffe (1949).
After his retirement, Sumption sat on the Supplementary Panel of the Supreme Court from 13 December 2018 to 30 January 2021. He voluntarily retired in 2021 because he considered it inappropriate to serve on the panel in view of his public criticisms of the government.
On 13 December 2019, Sumption was appointed as a Non-Permanent Judge of the Court of Final Appeal in Hong Kong by Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam. After making his pledge of allegiance to the Hong Kong SAR of the People's Republic of China as part of the judicial oath, Lord Sumption officially commenced his office as a Hong Kong judge on 18 December 2019. He had previously appeared as counsel in the Court of Final Appeal in a number of cases. On 6 June 2024, Lord Sumption resigned as a Non-Permanent Judge together with Lord Collins of Mapesbury, citing the political situation.
Sumption's narrative history of the Hundred Years' War between England and France (published in five volumes between 1990 and 2023) has been widely praised as "earning a place alongside Steven Runciman's A History of the Crusades" according to Frederic Raphael, and as a work that "deploys an enormous variety of documentary material ... and interprets it with imaginative and intelligent sympathy" and is "elegantly written" (Rosamond McKitterick, Evening Standard); for Allan Massie it is "An enterprise on a truly Victorian scale ... What is most impressive about this work, apart from the author's mastery of his material and his deployment of it, is his political intelligence".