Category: gender

‘During the live television coverage of the Supreme Court hearings in Miller (No 1), some commentators (and no doubt many members of the public) noted that almost all lawyers in the courtroom were male. That image of the UK’s “Supreme Court bar” (to borrow a US term), though not entirely accurate, highlighted an ongoing problem with gender representation. In a new study (available here), I analysed the trends of gender and seniority in counsel appearances before the House of Lords and the Supreme Court from 1970 to 2020 based on a unique dataset I created covering 5,041 lawyers and 2,714 judgments. I found that there are some very optimistic signs regarding appearances of the most junior counsel. However, gender balance among the more senior counsel is not as good and has not been clearly improving over the most recent years, which matters because counsel with more experience before the highest court dominate litigation in that court. The unprecedented representation of women among the most junior counsel in the Supreme Court gives nevertheless a reason to believe that the situation will improve also among the more senior counsel.’

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UK Constitutional Law Association , 15th March 2021

Source: ukconstitutionallaw.org