Brenda Hale: ‘I was right to choose law. I turned out to be quite good at it’

Lady Hale is wearing a metallic octopus brooch pinned to her maroon dress. “Some people think it is a spider,” she laughs, as she leads me into her book-lined office in the UK’s Supreme Court, past her desk with its collection of enamel frogs and Wind in the Willows figurines.

It was while wearing a diamanté spider that the first female president of the UK’s Supreme Court delivered the court’s historic ruling in September: that prime minister Boris Johnson had acted unlawfully in suspending parliament for five weeks just before Britain was set to leave the EU.

Within hours, Hale had become a social-media sensation. Weeks later, she hit the headlines again when she told the Association of State Girls’ Schools conference: “Let’s hear it for the girly swots” (seen by some as a dig at Johnson, who had used the phrase in cabinet papers disclosed in the court case).

Hale may only recently have become a household name but in the legal world she has long been a trailblazer: the first woman to be a Law Commissioner, the first female Law Lord and, in 2017, the first woman president of the Supreme Court, the UK’s highest court.

In person she is petite, sparky and laughs a lot. She is precise but down to earth. “Brenda Hale is that rare and wonderful thing,” says Baroness Helena Kennedy QC. “A serious intellectual with a great brain and a deep human understanding, as well as a fabulous sense of humour.”

Worldwide reaction to the prorogation case, particularly from countries that operate a common law system, was “surprising”, even to the 11 justices hearing the case.

“We began to realise it was regarded by them as a very, very important case about the rule of law,” Hale says.

“Generally speaking, the reaction from the legal world has been very positive — obviously, there are people who don’t agree but that happens all the time.”

She adds: “The focus on me and my spider brooch — that too was ­surprising, for different reasons.” Hale is known for her striking brooches, which include a centipede, a fox, a dragonfly and a butterfly (“Most of them are inexpensive costume jewellery”).

But why choose a spider that particular day? Her eyes gleam as I recount the various theories. Did it symbolise the tangled web of Brexit? Or was it a nod to Greek myth, where the spider represents hubris?

The truth is more prosaic. “I tend to wear dresses rather than suits, and I tend to wear a brooch. That was a very inexpensive brooch given to me by my husband. He thinks he got it at Cards Galore,” she says, adding that her many brooches “tend to migrate — they are almost all creatures — to a particular garment and stay there because it’s easy . . . I had no particular message from wearing it — it’s just that brooch lived on that dress.”

A state-school-educated woman, Hale has always been an unconventional figure in the clubby, male-dominated world of the law. She was born in 1945 to two teachers, and grew up with her two sisters in the north Yorkshire town of Richmond, with its cobbled marketplace and medieval castle.

Her father became headmaster of a small independent boys’ grammar school near Richmond but died when Hale was 13.

She regards her mother as one of her role models “not only because she was a very strong character and very brainy . . . but also because of the way that, when my father died very suddenly, she sort of picked herself up, dusted off her teaching qualifications and got a job as headteacher in the local primary school”.

This meant that Hale and her younger sister could “stay where we were at school and have as much ­stability as possible in our lives”. She flourished at Richmond High School for Girls, where she was the first student to be offered a place at Cambridge.

Was she a “girly swot”? “Oh yes! I’m not ashamed . . . I used to describe myself as a speccy swot because I wore specs, of course, but I think anyone who knew me at school would regard me as a swot, and a lot of girls were, and we didn’t think it was a bad thing . . . As long as you don’t spend all your life swotting. You’ve got to have a life as well.”

Her favourite subject was history but her headmistress suggested she read economics. “I wasn’t too keen on that . . . but I had been excited by the constitutional history, especially the 17th century.

I said, ‘What about law?’ and, a bit to my surprise, she said: ‘That’s a good idea’ . . . She was very encouraging, and it turned out that we were both right. I was right to choose law and . . . I turned out to be quite good at it,” she laughs.

So good, in fact, that at Cambridge University she graduated in 1966 with a starred first — top of her year of six women and about 100 men. When she started, just three colleges admitted women, and she recalls most women “regarded ourselves as relatively ordinary people and just very privileged to be there”.

By contrast, some of the former public schoolboys she encountered had a “sense of entitlement”.

After graduation, she opted to teach law at Manchester University, partly because they also wanted her to qualify as a barrister — which she did via a correspondence course.

She was the second woman to join her Manchester chambers but her pupil master disapproved of female barristers, despite his wife being a doctor. “He was very clear — medicine is a caring profession and women can care and should care.

But the Bar is a fighting profession and women shouldn’t fight and can’t fight,” she says. “He was right about the Bar and the judgment that you need and the courage you need to be a barrister . . . but he was wrong about women, of course.”

It was at Manchester that she married her first husband, Anthony Hoggett, a barrister, and opted to focus fully on academia in order to combine career and caring for their daughter Julia.

They divorced in 1992 and she married Julian Farrand, then a colleague at the Law Commission, whom she has dubbed her “Frog Prince”. “Now people give me frogs,” she says, smiling and picking one up from the collection on her desk.

At Manchester, Hale carved out a name for herself in family law and mental health, writing books including the influential Women and the Law (1984). “Everything I did to get my academic show on the road led directly or indirectly to a public appointment,” she says.

In 1984, she was the first woman to be appointed to the Law Commission, where she was the principal architect of the Children Act of 1989 — pioneering legislation that made the welfare of the child the court’s “paramount” concern. She became only the 10th female High Court judge in 1994 and later the second Court of Appeal judge after Elizabeth Butler-Sloss.

“I have been the second [woman] significant times in my life . . . and I am grateful for the first for paving the way,” she says.

In 2004, it was Hale who became the first female Law Lord and, after constitutional reform carved out the Supreme Court in 2009 and replaced the Law Lords, she became a justice and its first female president. She has since been joined by two other women in the 12-strong court but is vocal about the need for more female judges.

Hale has been compared to US Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg for her socially liberal and feminist approach. However, there are key differences — in the UK, parliament is supreme and the Supreme Court cannot strike down legislation. Its justices are not political appointees and their political allegiances are unknown.

Yet the UK Supreme Court’s decisions matter. The court has delivered important rulings on key social issues of the day, including assisted dying, prenuptial agreements, pensions equality, employment tribunal fees and domestic violence.

In 2011, in the housing case Yemshaw v LB Hounslow, leading a panel of five judges, Hale found in favour of Mrs Yemshaw, on the groundbreaking basis that the legal definition of “domestic violence” was no longer confined to physical assault but could include threatening or intimidating behaviour and other forms of abuse.

As a judge, Hale’s empathy has made her a popular figure. In 2008, when the Law Lords unanimously refused an independent inquiry into the Iraq war, she sympathised with the two mothers of the teenage soldiers who had brought the case, saying: “If my child had died in this way, that is exactly what I would want.”

Hale is notable for her jurisprudence on “human rights in its broadest sense”, says Erika Rackley, professor of law at the University of Kent. “She is a judge with a touch of humanity — she’s got that in spades.”

Hale herself is particularly proud of the Children Act 1989, which she believes “has stood the test of time pretty well”, and she is “very proud” of the Supreme Court for the unanimous prorogation case because “of what it says about the rule of law in this country”.

At 74, her work rate remains formidable — she is a prolific speaker and the subject of a new children’s book, which she read to schoolchildren in her local library in Richmond. She has appeared as a judge on a special edition of MasterChef, and she and her husband are rugby fans (“That’s the only thing I watch on TV”).

When she retires from the Supreme Court next month, she has no appetite for a quieter life. From February, she will sit for a month in the Hong Kong Court of Final Appeal as one of its non-permanent judges, and then plans to sit as a crossbencher in the House of Lords.

“I ought to see if there is a useful contribution I can make there,” she says, before adding, “I am going to have plenty to do.”

Jane Croft is the FT’s Law Courts correspondent

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