Jonathan Sumption, Lord Sumption

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Court of Final Appeal of Hong Kong
Assumed office
18 December 2019
Appointed byCarrie Lam
Personal details
Born (1948-12-09) 9 December 1948 (age 75)
Nationality
British citizenship
Spouse(s)Teresa Sumption, née Whelan
Children2 daughters; 1 son
Parent(s)Anthony Sumption
Hilda Hedigan
Residence(s)London, England
EducationEton College
Alma materMagdalen College, Oxford
OccupationBarrister; judge
ProfessionLaw
Chinese name
Chinese岑耀信
OBE ribbon

Jonathan Philip Chadwick Sumption, Lord Sumption,

medieval historian, former senior judge who sat on the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom
between 2012 and 2018, and a current Non-Permanent Judge of the Hong Kong Court of Final Appeal since 2019.

Sumption was sworn in as a Justice of the Supreme Court on 11 January 2012, succeeding Lawrence Collins, Baron Collins of Mapesbury.[1] 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

HM Government's behalf,[2] in the Three Rivers case,[3] 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,[4] for defending HM Government in an appeal hearing brought by Binyam Mohamed,[5] and for successfully defending Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich in a private lawsuit brought by Boris Berezovsky.[6]

A former academic, Sumption was appointed an

Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London
(FSA).

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Sumption criticised lockdowns and associated British government policies as economically harmful.[8]

Early life and education

Jonathan Sumption was born on 9 December 1948. He is the eldest of the four children of

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.[15][16] In 1974 Joseph and Margaret Thatcher together founded the Centre for Policy Studies to act as a think tank for the Conservative Party, and Sumption became one of its earliest employees, working as a speechwriter for Joseph.[17] 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".[16]

In the late 1970s Sumption was a regular contributor to The Sunday Telegraph.

Legal career

Sumption joined

Guernsey Court of Appeal. In 2005, Sumption became joint head of Brick Court Chambers.[4] 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

Administrative Court concerning proposed development near his home at Greenwich.[19][20]

Earnings as a barrister

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.[12][21] 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.[21]

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

Cabinet Minister to be cross-examined in the High Court
in relation to his actions in modern times: the British Government won the case.

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.[23]

Judicial career

On 4 May 2011 Sumption's appointment as a

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).[25][26]

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.[27] He retired from the Supreme Court on 9 December 2018.[28]

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

Lord Radcliffe
(1949).

After his retirement, Sumption sat on the Supplementary Panel of the Supreme Court[30] from 13 December 2018 to 30 January 2021.[31] He voluntarily retired in 2021 because he considered it inappropriate to serve on the panel in view of his public criticisms of the government.[32]

On 13 December 2019, Sumption was appointed as a Non-Permanent Judge of the

People's Republic of China as part of the judicial oath,[34] Lord Sumption officially commenced his office as a Hong Kong judge on 18 December 2019.[33][35] He had previously appeared as counsel in the Court of Final Appeal in a number of cases.[a]

Historian

The Hundred Years' War

Sumption's narrative history of the Hundred Years' War between England and France (of which five volumes have been published, 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".[b] Volume I (covering the years from the funeral of Charles IV of France in 1329 to the Surrender of Calais in 1347) was first published in 1990. Volume II (covering the years from 1347 to 1369) was published in 1999. Volume III (covering the years from 1369 to 1399) appeared in 2009. Volume IV (covering the years from 1399 to 1422) appeared in 2015, the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Agincourt. Volume V (covering the years from 1422 to 1453) was published in 2023.

Sumption has been praised[by whom?] for a clipped and polished prose style, which he credits to his unwillingness to employ cliché. He admires Edward Gibbon but points out that "if anybody wrote like him today they'd be dismissed as a pompous fart".[36]

Political views

Sumption has been described as a "

economically liberal think-tank. However, he was a Labour supporter at the time and later voted for Tony Blair.[38]

He has said that an attempt to rapidly achieve

positive discrimination could end up discouraging the best applicants, as they would no longer believe that the process would select on merit, and "have appalling consequences for justice".[39][40] He has criticised the judicial appointments process in the United States, where politicians quiz judicial appointees on their views, as "discreditable" and described former Attorney General for England and Wales Sir Geoffrey Cox's proposal for a similar system as, "one of the most ill-thought-out ideas ever to emerge from a resentful government frustrated by its inability to do whatever it likes".[41]

He has criticised the historical curriculum in

Irish Famine and the Armenian genocide as "morally worthless", although saying that, "we have a duty to understand why things happened as they did" and there are "lessons to be learned".[42] In the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests following the murder of George Floyd in May 2020 in Minneapolis, the United States, Sumption criticised the removal of monuments, arguing that people of the past did not share the values of the present and calling it "an irrational and absurd thing to do".[42]

In 2023, the New Statesman named him as the 47th most influential right-wing figure in British politics.[43]

Brexit

He voted to remain in the European Union in the 2016 referendum, describing the decision to leave as, "a serious mistake that will do lasting damage to our economy"[44] and that, "Britain will be dominated by the European Union whether we belong to it or not".[45] Nevertheless, he believed there were strong arguments for Brexit on the grounds of national sovereignty and identity.[46] He said that leavers, "were not mad. They are not irrational, not naive and have not been deceived".[44] He wrote that, "All of these patronising explanations of their decision seems to me to be mere attempts to evade unpalatable truths."[47]

Judicial review and politics

Sumption has written in detail about his concerns regarding the relationship between the

Article 8 of the convention, which he describes as, "the most striking example of this kind of mission creep."[51] He has said that if there was no significant change in the approach of the Strasburg court then he would support withdrawing from the convention.[52]

COVID-19 pandemic

Sumption has been highly critical of the British government's lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic on civil libertarian grounds, seeing them as a slippery slope,[53][37] while also criticising the legal basis for their enactment and the enforceability of COVID-19 control measures.[54][55][56][57] He has also questioned whether the virus is serious enough to justify restrictive measures, while also arguing that the effects of lockdowns may be worse than the effects of the actual virus, attracting controversy and debate in British media outlets.[8][58][59][54]

On 17 January 2021, Sumption appeared on The Big Questions to discuss the question of whether the lockdown was "punishing too many for the greater good", and said (with reference to the medical concept of quality-adjusted life years) that "I don't accept that all lives are of equal value. My children's and my grandchildren's life is worth much more than mine because they've got a lot more of it ahead". When a cancer patient taking part in the debate said that he was saying that her life was "not valuable", Sumption interrupted her, saying: "I didn't say your life was not valuable, I said it was less valuable."[60] Health experts have criticised his views, stating that the concept of "quality adjusted life years" is primarily useful for debates on the allocation of scarce healthcare resources, and may not be useful for discussion of a nationwide lockdown.[61]

In July 2021, Full Fact concluded in a fact-checking article that Sumption had "made several mistakes with Covid-19 data when talking about the disease" on BBC Radio 4's Today programme. This included incorrect statements that many recorded COVID-19 deaths were people who had the virus but had died of unrelated causes, that people who had died of COVID-19 "would probably have died within a year after" (on average, British COVID-19 victims lost around a decade of life), and that only "hundreds" of people without pre-existing medical conditions in the UK had died of COVID-19 (the true figure, up to the end of March 2021, was 15,883 in England and Wales alone).[62]

Professor of Health and Law John Coggon critiqued Sumption's philosophical and legal arguments against COVID-19 restrictions in the Journal of Medical Ethics; he also contrasted Sumption's libertarian arguments against such restrictions with arguments he himself had made against the right to die when giving his judgment in R (Nicklinson) v Ministry of Justice, when he argued that the moral principle of sanctity of life should be protected in law.[63]

Personal life

Sumption married Teresa Whelan and they have two daughters, one son, and five grandchildren. He lives in Greenwich and has a second home, a chateau in the village of Berbiguières in the south of France.[11]

Sumption speaks French and Italian fluently, and reads Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, Catalan and Latin.[12] He "rarely learned them using guides, instead I preferred to muddle on through a text with a dictionary by my side".[36]

An opera lover, he serves as a director of the English National Opera and as a governor of the Royal Academy of Music.[64]

Full style

  • PC

Notable cases

As counsel

As judge

Two books are dedicated to Sumption's contribution to private and public law, respectively.[65] The following cases are an excerpt of his contribution to the law:

Books

  • Pilgrimage: An Image of Medieval Religion. 1975.
    ISBN 1-58768-025-4
    .
  • The Albigensian Crusade. 1978.
    ISBN 0-571-11064-9
    .
  • Equality. 1979.
    ISBN 0-7195-3651-0. with Sir Keith Joseph
    )
  • The Hundred Years War I: Trial by Battle. 1990.
    ISBN 978-0-571-20095-5
  • The Hundred Years War II: Trial by Fire. 1999.
    ISBN 0-571-20737-5
  • The Hundred Years War III: Divided Houses. 2009.
    ISBN 0-571-13897-7
    .
  • The Hundred Years War IV: Cursed Kings. 2015.
    ISBN 0-571-27454-4
    .
  • ISBN 1-788-16372-9
    .
  • Law in a Time of Crisis. 2021.
    ISBN 9781788167116
    .
  • The Hundred Years War V: Triumph and Illusion. 2023.
    ISBN 0-571-27457-9
    .

References

Notes

  1. ^ For example, Akai Holdings Ltd v Thanakharn Kasikorn Thai Chamkat, FACV 16/2009, reported at (2010) 13 HKCFAR 479, and Goldlion Properties Limited v Regent National Enterprises Limited, FACV 10/2008, reported at (2009) 12 HKCFAR 512
  2. ^ Quotations from the selection of reviews displayed on the back of The Hundred Years War III: Divided Houses

Citations

  1. ^ a b "Jonathan Sumption QC to be sworn in as Supreme Court Justice" (PDF). Supreme Court of the United Kingdom. 10 January 2012. Retrieved 10 January 2012.
  2. ^ Dodd (2003).
  3. ^ Law Lords Department (2000).
  4. ^ a b Irvine (2011).
  5. ^ Leigh (2010).
  6. ^ Croft (2012).
  7. ^ "No. 56797". The London Gazette (Supplement). 31 December 2002. p. 24.
  8. ^ a b Toynbee, Polly (7 April 2020). "Your money or your life? Coronavirus has sparked the latest culture war". The Guardian. Retrieved 2 September 2020.
  9. ^ "Index entry". FreeBMD. ONS. Retrieved 21 May 2019.
  10. ^ Daily Telegraph (2008).
  11. ^ a b Steavenson, Wendell (6 August 2015). "Jonathan Sumption: the Brain of Britain". The Guardian. Retrieved 4 June 2021.
  12. ^ a b c d Steavenson, Wendell (6 August 2015). "Jonathan Sumption: the brain of Britain". Retrieved 15 August 2015.
  13. ^ Brick Court Chambers website: Jonathan Sumption QC’s Full CV Archived 8 October 2011 at the Wayback Machine Retrieved: 16 October 2011
  14. ^ a b "Jonathan Sumption Appointed to Supreme Court". Magdalen College, University of Oxford. 23 January 2012. Retrieved 17 June 2021.
  15. ^ Bogdanor, Vernon (21 May 2013). "Sir Keith Joseph and the Market Economy, Lecture delivered at Gresham College". Lecture delivered at Gresham College. Archived from the original on 8 May 2017.
  16. ^ a b Irvine, Ian (14 October 2011). "Jonathan Sumption: Donnish but deadly". The Independent.
  17. Sumption, Jonathan (29 May 2020). "The Jonathan Sumption One". Political Thinking with Nick Robinson (Interview). Interviewed by Nick Robinson. London, United Kingdom: BBC Radio 4. Archived from the original
    on 31 October 2020. Retrieved 14 April 2021.
  18. ^ "Judiciary". Jersey Law. Archived from the original on 10 February 2011. Retrieved 11 May 2011.
  19. ^ East Hants Council (2007).
  20. ^ "R (Sumption) v Greenwich LBC [2007] EWHC 2776 (Admin), [2008] P & CR 20 (25 March 2015)" (PDF).
  21. ^ a b Dyer (2003).
  22. ^ Daily Telegraph (2005).
  23. ^ "Chelsea's big defender – the QC paid £8m". The Times. 9 September 2012. Retrieved 1 December 2020.
  24. ^ "Press Release:Senior Judicial Appointments". Number 10. 4 May 2011.
  25. ^ "Courtesy titles for Justices of the Supreme Court" (PDF). Supreme Court of the United Kingdom. 13 December 2010. Retrieved 14 December 2010.
  26. ^ "No. 59746". The London Gazette. 1 April 2011. pp. 6177–6178.
  27. ^ "Orders approved at Privy Council 14 December 2011" (PDF). Privy Council Office. Retrieved 13 January 2012.
  28. ^ "Former Justices". Supreme Court of the United Kingdom. Retrieved 13 December 2018.
  29. ^ "Burke's Peerage". burkespeerage.com.
  30. ^ Constitutional Reform Act 2005, section 39
  31. ^ "Lord Sumption – a Freedom of Information request to Supreme Court of the United Kingdom". WhatDoTheyKnow. 14 June 2021.
  32. ^ Email from Sumption dated 30.01.2021 provided by the Supreme Court in a FOI request, 'FOI 2021 29 Recorded information 12 7 21.pdf'[1]
  33. ^ a b "Appointments of non-permanent judge from another common law jurisdiction of the Court of Final Appeal and the Chief Judge of the High Court". Government of Hong Kong. 13 December 2019.
  34. ^ "Oaths and Declarations Ordinance (Cap. 11)". Hong Kong e-Legislation. Section 17, Part V of Schedule 2, and Part I of Schedule 3
  35. ^ Shum, Michael (19 March 2021). "Calls for UK judges to quit are 'out of order'". The Standard (Hong Kong). Retrieved 25 March 2021. As a Hong Kong judge...
  36. ^ a b c "Jonathan Sumption Interview | Quadrapheme". quadrapheme.com. Archived from the original on 14 April 2016. Retrieved 28 October 2015.
  37. ^
    S2CID 225786565
    . Retrieved 17 September 2020.
  38. ^ Johnston, Philip (4 June 2021). "Lord Sumption: 'I have observed that lockdown scepticism goes with high levels of education'". The Daily Telegraph. London. Retrieved 4 June 2021.
  39. ^ Cohen, Nick (27 September 2015). "Why the Women's Equality party is long overdue". The Guardian. Retrieved 27 September 2015.
  40. ^ Bentham, Martin (21 September 2015). "Rush for gender equality with top judges 'could have appalling consequences for justice'". Evening Standard. London. Retrieved 27 September 2015.
  41. ^ Sumption 2021, p. 203.
  42. ^ a b Sumption 2021, p. 25.
  43. ^ "The New Statesman's right power list". New Statesman. 27 September 2023. Retrieved 14 December 2023.
  44. ^ a b Sumption 2021, p. 166.
  45. ^ Sumption 2021, p. 182.
  46. ^ Sumption 2021, pp. 172–173.
  47. ^ Sumption 2021, p. 172.
  48. ^ Sumption 2021, p. 202.
  49. ^ Petley, Giannoulopoulos, Julian, Dimitrios (10 June 2019). ""Attacks on Grieve and Bercow stem from flawed, feudal ideas of 'sovereignty'"". Retrieved 17 September 2020.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  50. ^ Sumption, Jonathan (2013). The Limits of the Law: 27th Sultan Azlan Shah Lecture. Speech in Kuala Lumpur.
  51. ^ Sumption, Jonathan (2019). Trials of the State: Law and the Decline of Politics. Profile Books. pp. 56–57.
  52. ^ Sumption, Jonathan (2019). Human Rights and Wrongs. BBC Reith Lectures.
  53. ^ Sumption, Jonathan (17 May 2020). "Set us free from lockdown, ministers, and stop covering your backs". The Sunday Times.
  54. ^ a b Compton, Jonathan (19 May 2020). "Lord Sumption is wrong on lockdown liberty". Law Gazette. Retrieved 2 September 2020.
  55. ^ Pearson, Allison; Halligan, Liam (10 September 2020). "Planet Normal: Use of fear has brought about 'the greatest invasion of personal liberty in our history' –Lord Sumption". The Daily Telegraph. London.
  56. ^ "Ex–Supreme Court judge Lord Sumption says rule of six is ′unenforceable′". LBC News. London. 13 September 2020. Retrieved 13 September 2020.
  57. ^ Hymas, Charles (27 October 2020). "Lord Sumption: Ministers stoked fear to justify lockdowns". The Daily Telegraph. London.
  58. ^ The World at One. BBC Radio 4. 30 March 2020.
  59. ^ Buchan, Lizzy (30 March 2020). "Coronavirus: Former Supreme Court justice warns of 'collective hysteria' over outbreak". The Independent. Archived from the original on 14 June 2022. Retrieved 2 September 2020.
  60. ^ Skopeliti, Clea (17 January 2021). "Lord Sumption tells stage 4 cancer patient her life is 'less valuable'". The Guardian. Retrieved 18 January 2021.
  61. ^ "Experts unconvinced by Lord Sumption's lockdown ethics". The Guardian. 19 January 2021. Retrieved 22 July 2021.
  62. ^ "Lord Sumption made several errors about Covid on Today". Full Fact. 20 July 2021. Retrieved 22 July 2021.
  63. S2CID 235808548
    .
  64. ^ "Governing Body". Royal Academy of Music. Archived from the original on 10 April 2019. Retrieved 10 April 2019.
  65. ^ Day & Worthington, Challenging Private Law – Lord Sumption on the Supreme Court (Hart 2020); Ekins, Yowell & Barber, Lord Sumption and the Limits of the Law (Hart 2016)
  66. ^ "Kelly & Ors v Fraser (Jamaicas) [2012] UKPC 25 (12 July 2012)".
  67. ^ "Prest v Petrodel Resources Ltd & Ors [2013] UKSC 34 (12 June 2013)".
  68. ^ "Bank Mellat v Her Majesty's Treasury (No. 2) [2013] UKSC 39 (19 June 2013)".
  69. ^ "Virgin Atlantic Airways Ltd v Zodiac Seats UK Ltd [2013] UKSC 46 (3 July 2013)".
  70. ^ "Williams v Central Bank of Nigeria [2014] UKSC 10 (19 February 2014)".
  71. ^ "Nicklinson & Anor R (On the application of) (Rev 1) [2014] UKSC 38 (25 June 2014)".
  72. ^ "Lord Carlile of Berriew QC, & Ors, R (On the application of) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2014] UKSC 60 (12 November 2014)".
  73. ^ "Pham v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2015] UKSC 19 (25 March 2015)".
  74. ^ "Jetivia SA & Anor v Bilta (UK) Ltd & Ors [2015] UKSC 23 (22 April 2015)".
  75. ^ "Credit Agricole Corporation and Investment Bank v Papadimitriou (Gibraltar) [2015] UKPC 13 (24 March 2015)".
  76. ^ "Bunge SA v Nidera BV [2015] UKSC 43 (1 July 2015)".
  77. ^ "Cavendish Square Holding BV v Talal el Makdessi (Rev 3) [2015] UKSC 67 (4 November 2015)".
  78. ^ "Bailey & Anor v Angove's PTY Ltd [2016] UKSC 47 (27 July 2016)".
  79. ^ "Patel v Mirza [2016] UKSC 42 (20 July 2016)".
  80. ^ "JSC BTA Bank v Khrapunov [2018] UKSC 19 (21 March 2018)".
  81. ^ "Rock Advertising Ltd v MWB Business Exchange Centres Ltd [2018] UKSC 24 (16 May 2018)".

Sources

External links

Legal offices
Preceded by
None
 Non-Permanent Judge of the
Court of Final Appeal of Hong Kong

2019–present 		Incumbent
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jonathan_Sumption,_Lord_Sumption&oldid=1219201481"