On 5 November 2015, Lady Hale gave a public lecture at the University of Birmingham on “Appointments to the Supreme Court”, in which she argued ‘we ought to be ashamed of ourselves … [i]f we do not manage to achieve a (much) more diverse [Supreme] Court’ in the process of filling the six vacancies which are due to arise over the next three years.

The lecture was widely reported in the UK, including in The Guardian, the Solicitors Journal, and the Pink News as well as overseas, including in the Australasian Lawyer.

The lecture was also widely discussed on Twitter, collected on Storify.

You can read the lecture in full online. 

The lecture was part of an international conference, hosted by Birmingham Law School and the University of Sheffield to mark the up-coming 10th anniversary of the Judicial Appointments Commission (JAC). The conference was attended by over 50 lawyers, judges, civil servants as well as commissioners and staff from the JAC.