The Birth and First Steps of the UK Supreme Court

Abstract

At the end of this legal year I will step down from my position as the first President of the UK Supreme Court, having overseen the first three years of its existence. It would be nice to be able to say that I was involved in the creation of the Court from the first twinkle in the eye to the present day. But it was not to be. No senior judge had been consulted or even warned before Tony Blair announced in June 2003 that the Law Lords were to be abolished and a supreme court to be created in their place. The decision was part of a constitutional package, which included the abolition of the office of Lord Chancellor. The latter aim proved more complicated than the Prime Minister anticipated, and we still have a Lord Chancellor with important statutory responsibility for upholding the rule of law and the independence of the judiciary, albeit with his judicial functions removed. Notwithstanding the shock of the manner of the announcement, I had for many years shared the opinion of Lord Bingham and other senior jurists that the importance in our unwritten constitution of the separation of powers required the UK to change its arrangements for hearing appeals at the highest level. The Lord Chancellor, amember of the government but also then the highest judge in the land, presided over the Law Lords, who were not only judges but members of a legislative body in the House of Lords. For the public, this was a confusing picture and an ‘appeal to the House of Lords’ did not make it clear that, in practice, the judicial and legislative functions of this body were kept almost completely separate. Moreover, justice could not easily be seen to be done with hearings in a remote committee room and judgments delivered on the floor of the House in a ceremony which conveyed almost nothing about the decision that had been made. A supreme court would be a change of form rather than substance, but form in this instance was of vital importance. It took two years to pass the necessary legislative measures—found in the Constitutional Reform Act 2005—and a further four years before the Supreme Court opened its doors on 1 October 2009. The majority of the delay was