How To Fail With Elizabeth Day - S12, Ep7 How to Fail: Lady Hale

Episode Date: October 13, 2021

Well this one was quite intimidating, to be honest. My guest this week is Baroness Hale of Richmond, one of this country's finest legal minds. She was the first woman President of the supreme court, the youngest and first female commissioner to be appointed to the Law Commission and has been dubbed the Beyoncé of the legal world owing to her popularity among young law students.But you might just know her best for her spider brooch, which she wore in 2019 while delivering a stinging ruling finding Boris Johnson’s prorogation of Parliament to be unlawful. Her memoir, Spider Woman: A Life, has just been published.Lady Hale joins me to talk about battling sexism in law, her failures at school and academia, the loss of her father at a young age, the death of her beloved husband during Covid and her 'abject failure to knit a dishcloth aged five.' Along the way we cover, Beyonce, spiders, Ian McEwan and much, much more.--Spider Woman: A Life is out now. You can order your copy here.--My new novel, Magpie, is out now. You can order it here.---How To Fail With Elizabeth Day is hosted by Elizabeth Day, produced by Naomi Mantin and Chris Sharp. To contact us, email [e-mail]---Social Media:Elizabeth Day @elizabdayHow To Fail @howtofailpod Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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haven't gone right. This is a podcast about learning from our mistakes and understanding that why we fail ultimately makes us stronger, because learning how to fail in life actually means learning how to succeed better. I'm your host, author and journalist Elizabeth Day, and every week I'll be asking a new interviewee what they've learned from failure. When Baroness Hale of Richmond was made Britain's first female law lord, she created a coat of arms for her new title, bearing the Latin phrase for women are equal to everything. This was indicative of her approach throughout her career, although arguably Lady Hale is a woman more equal than most. She was the first woman to serve on the UK's Supreme Court and in 2017 became its first female president until her retirement

last year. In 2019, she won global attention for finding Boris Johnson's prorogation of Parliament to be unlawful. The ruling, which she delivered in no uncertain terms while wearing a black dress pinned with a spider brooch, made her into something of a social media star. Soon the spider brooch had its own line of t-shirts and Lady Hale was being dubbed the Beyonce of the legal profession. Although this was the ruling that brought her most attention, close watchers of Lady Hale's career would not have been surprised. She grew up in Richmond, North Yorkshire, the child of head teachers. She went to grammar school, then on to Girton College, Cambridge,

one of only six women studying law in a year group of more than 100. She graduated with a starred first. After that, Lady Hale spent most of her career in academia, working part-time as a barrister. And when she became the youngest person appointed to the Law Commission at the age of 39, she oversaw a number of important reforms in family law, including helping to devise the Children Act in 1989, granting powers to ensure children are safeguarded. It was an act which was later immortalised in an eponymous novel by Ian McEwan. I hope I have made a difference, Lady Hale writes in her newly published memoir, Spider Woman. I hope that I have encouraged many other young people to believe that they too can make it in the law. And I'm not planning to give that up anytime soon.

Lady Hale, welcome to How to Fail. Well, thank you very much for inviting me. I've just realised that your name rhymes with the podcast title, so it was clearly destined to be. But just picking up on that last quote from your wonderful memoir, Spider Woman, do you think you have made a difference, a difference that you are satisfied with? Do you think you have made a difference, a difference that you are satisfied with? I don't think it's ever possible to be satisfied wholly with what one's done with one's life. I hope I've made a difference. I am encouraged to believe I've made a difference by all the encouraging things that young people in particular say to me. And do you mind me asking an indelicate question? How old are you now?

I'm 76. So you say also in that quote that you're not planning to give that up anytime soon. Do you feel like you have just as much energy as you did have when you were at Girton College, when you were the youngest person ever to be part of the Law Commission? How are the energy levels? person ever to be part of the Law Commission. How are the energy levels? Not bad at all, I think. I'm still enjoying doing as many events as I possibly can. In many ways, of course, lockdown has made that easier, because one can do remote events. Whereas in the olden days, you had to travel to places and not everywhere was easy to travel to, especially if you had a full-time job. But I'm hoping that the publication of Spider Woman will also act as encouragement to younger people, to women, to people from less obviously advantaged backgrounds to think that they too can make a success of their lives in the

law and indeed in anything else. Did you enjoy writing Spider Woman? I did enjoy writing Spider Woman. I wouldn't have found time to do it if it hadn't been for lockdown. So it's another thing to be grateful to lockdown for. But yes, I did. It benefited hugely from the efforts of the editor at Bodley Head, the publishers, of the editor at Bodley Head, the publishers, because he encouraged me to say more about myself and my own feelings than had come naturally to me when I wrote the first draft. And why do you think it doesn't come naturally to you to write? Is it because you've had to be

so conscious of not proffering personal or political opinions because of your professional standing? I think because of my profession, one tries to suppress one's innermost self, not of course, one's legal opinions or one's values about the law, but certainly things about one's own feelings beneath the surface, not something one normally talks about much. And do you think that that's a generational thing as well? Because quite a lot of millennials are very happy to talk about their feelings all the time. So I understand, yes, it almost certainly is a product of my age and upbringing. So has it in a way, writing the book and having retired from the Supreme Court, has that been liberating in the

way that you maybe can explore more of your innermost self? Well, one would have to read the book to decide whether there's more of me in it than anybody who knows me well could have guessed. I'm not sure about that. There are certain things that I'm still not able to be completely open about because I think as a retired judge there are certain constraints to what one can and should say. My main objective is while writing the book with a view to encouraging and enthusing other people with the law and with what it can do and with what they can do with their lives, I certainly do not want to make life any more difficult than it already is for the Supreme Court or the justice system in this country. Your enthusiasm comes across loud and clear in the book, as does your wit, I have to say.

I did enjoy the asides about Lord Hope, which you have to read the book to get. He was someone who in his diaries probably wasn't necessarily always complimentary about you. But you make the point that you are a trailblazer, as I made clear in the introduction. And when you became the first female law lord, there were many who looked on your arrival with some trepidation. And you make the point, and it's quite a generous point, that they were all men with very limited experience of women as equal colleagues. Just tell us a bit about that, about how important it has been for you to blaze this kind of trail. Of course, it's important. I was brought up to believe that girls could go into whatever walk of life they wanted to go into, including being a mother and a housewife and

staying at home. So was anything else that one wanted to do and could do. So I've grown up with that all my life. And so I went into all of these things expecting that it would be difficult, but that it would be possible. And certainly that there shouldn't be any objection to me just because I was a woman. And I think it was quite difficult. Some of my colleagues, by no means all, many of them were really anxious to have a woman on board because they realised that it was about time there were more women in senior positions in the law. So it wasn't a feeling that they all had, but they didn't have a lot of experience of it. And of course, we are a bit different. I mean, I smile a lot. I do have a sense of humour. And of course, there are things that maybe I don't like being said. I wouldn't like to accuse my colleagues in the law

of much in the way of the sort of casual sexism and indeed racism that there is around and always has been. But I think from time to time, people say things without realising what they're saying and realising that if anybody takes exception to it, they've got a point. And so from time to time, no doubt, I could be a worry. Obstreperous is a word that has been used by a former colleague to describe you. Do you think that word would be used of a man? I don't know. There are lots of words that one thinks

would not be used of a man, like strident or bossy or schoolmarmish, all words that have been used about me. So, yes, people do look at women differently and judge them. I don't know that I am obstreperous. Mostly people found me quite reasonable to work with, I think. But, of course, from time to time, I did take a different view. I mean, maybe you thought they were obstreperous, quite frankly. So let's talk about the spider brooch. I'm sure you're sick to death of it. But it was a spider brooch that cost £12

from cards galore of all places. And it did become this viral sensation and I personally hugely enjoyed watching that video of you delivering the ruling. Do you enjoy the performative aspect of that kind of work? That's a very very interesting question which I cannot remember ever having been asked before. I think most people who go into either academic life in the sense of teaching or into the law as an advocate know that they have to perform. Every lecture is a performance. Every seminar is a performance. Every appearance in court is a performance. And that is true both of the ministers and of the judges. and of judges. Most of us have got a certain amount of experience of amateur dramatics as well as our performances in court or in the university lecture theatre. Yes, one is a performer,

of course. I'm performing now. Yes, and you're doing so wonderfully. What's happened to the spider brooch? Where do you keep it? Well, it is in my drawer full of brooches in my London flat. I do have a huge number of brooches, very few of them of any monetary value, most of them quite sparkly, and most of them of creatures of one sort or another. dragonflies, bees, beetles, and so on and so on. And it all started when I was in the family division, where because we're sitting in private, we don't wear robes, but we are expected to dress in sober, dark suits or dresses. And my husband started giving me brooches to slightly liven things up a bit and to cheer me up. And it began with an antique silver spider brooch, the very first, and it developed from there. And of course, once people knew that I liked wearing brooches, then other people gave me brooches too. So the collection is rather large.

There's a Toad of Toad Hall reference, isn't there, in terms of frogs and your late husband? Tell us about that. Well, yes, it developed really. It began with his likening his style of driving, not inaccurate. I'm sure his children will forgive me for saying so. Once on my birthday, he gave me a vase of flowers and the vase was a frog a very large frog then filled with oasis and then filled with flowers quite delightful it appeared on my desk one morning he was convinced it was a toad and I think just from then on people began to think I liked frogs and so we developed that he became my frog prince in due course when eventually we did get together and get married.

That's basically that. Mistaking a toad for a frog or a frog. I'm very aware because you write about it in the book very movingly that Julian, your husband, died in July 2020, very suddenly, and you had a funeral under COVID regulations. And I just wanted to say how sorry I am for that. And to ask how you are. Oh, that's extremely kind of you. Well, I'm doing the best I can. It's very difficult when you lose somebody whom you love very much, and who is definitely the person with whom you want to spend the most time that you possibly can. And we all thought he was going to live forever because he was so healthy. And so it was a huge shock that he died so suddenly. But there are consolations, one of which was that we had actually had an idyllic few months lockdown in our home in

North Yorkshire, which is a beautiful home with a lovely garden in lovely countryside. And we had enjoyed our time then. And the other consolation, of course, was that he didn't suffer because it was so very, very quick. But he leaves behind not only me, but other members of the family who miss him sorely and wish he was still here with us. I'm sure I'm so glad you have your frogs and I also I'm very aware Lady Hill that whenever you talk or whenever you write you are at pains to contextualize your experience and to acknowledge your luck and to express your gratitude, and to think of others. And I think it's a very admirable quality. And even when you write about Julian dying, you do that so clearly. And you say, you know, actually, given what other people went through

during COVID-19, we were very lucky in myriad ways. And I just wanted to say that I think that that's a lesson to us all. But let's get on to your failures. So your first one is rather unexpected, I have to say. Your first one, in your words, it's your abject failure to knit a dishcloth at five years old. Tell us what happened there. Well, there I was was I think I was probably in my first year in Bolton-Onswell Church of England primary school the first and second years were the infants and we were in the infants classroom there only were two classrooms in the school presided over by a formidable but very very competent woman teacher who had no qualifications but knew exactly what she was doing. And I was, of course, pretty good at the three R's,

but we also had to do practical things. And the first practical thing that we had to do was to knit a dishcloth. Very large needles, very thick yarn that we were using, and I dropped a stitch and didn't confess that I had dropped a stitch until we'd more or less got to the end. So the teacher tut-tutted and then of course went down the dishcloth to pick up the stitch and looped it back up so that the whole thing didn't unravel and you can imagine what a sorry looking dishcloth was certainly no use at all as a dishcloth so yes I might be good academically

there were some practical skills that I would have to work on. Do you think it also taught you I mean I can so relate to this because I was always dropping stitches and knitting and you can never get it back. It always ruins the whole thing. But that thing of not confessing to your mistake, do you think it also taught you that you should own things when they happen and that's a sort of better way to go about life? Well, yes, I'm sure it did. I'm not sure that I always followed my own perception but yes on the whole if things go wrong it's best to put your hands up and say sorry it's not going right and we do that again and it's so interesting that this dates from when you were five and you clearly have a very vivid memory of it do you have I mean I assume you have a very vivid memory of it. Do you have, I mean, I assume you have a very good

memory because of what you do, but do you find it easy to recall what it was like being a child? I'm not sure that I do. I used to have absolutely brilliant memory. That's one of the reasons I was so good at law exams because they depended so much on memory in those days. There's no such thing as an open book exam or indeed examination by dissertation and things like that was all you know your standard three-hour memory test I was very good at it I no longer anything like as good at remembering things I think it's something that happens to all of us in due course it has something to do as indeed my late husband Julian used to say, not actually having enough ready access memory to save things in. So there's a lot there, but it's sitting

underneath and inaccessible. That was always his excuse if he'd forgotten something. I love that. I'm going to adopt that myself. It's pretty good, isn't it? Yes. So actually, to answer your question, which has to do with memories of childhood, I think what we tend to have the older we get is not memories of childhood, but memories of memories of childhood. So things that we remembered enough to talk about earlier in our lives stick with us. So I have a thought that my first memory was of sitting on the floor playing with a wooden toy duck on wheels when I was about two, maybe 18 months. And that's what I think is my earliest memory. But actually, I don't think it's a real memory. I think it's a memory of a memory

of a memory. Yes, that's very interesting. And you mentioned earlier that your parents just were very encouraging in the sense of you felt that you could do whatever you set your mind to. When you failed to knit this dishcloth, was there any sense, did you internalise that failure as I am a failure, Brenda, myself? I don't think so. I don't think it would be taken very seriously as a failure. But is it true that your headteacher told you you weren't clever enough to study history and that's what sent you into the law? That's a joke I make. Okay. The more accurate account is that by the time I got to the stage of choosing my A-levels and then choosing what I would apply to university, my headmistress, who was an Oxford graduate, did think that I was clever enough to go to either Oxford or Cambridge. And in those days, you could apply to both. But she was a historian and she didn't think that I was a natural historian. So she said to me, can we think what else you might read?

She was rather keen on the idea of economics. I was not at all keen on the idea of economics. We'd done some economic history as part of our A-level history course, and I had not liked the theory at all. I was a much more practical down-to-earth sort of scholar. But I had thoroughly enjoyed, as I make clear, I think, in the book, the constitutional history of the 17th century, which is the most important century politically and constitutionally for this country. And so I said, hey, what about law? And to her eternal credit, she didn't say nonsense. Girls don't do law. We've never had anybody in the school do law before. Or if they do do law, girls only do it

because their fathers are solicitors and so on. She didn't say any of that. She actually said, that's a good idea. Nothing we could do to help you, but we're going to encourage you as much as we can. So that's why I say that I chose to read law because my headmistress did not think I was clever enough to read history. What I think her real words were are not natural historical. Your childhood sounds very contented in many respects, but there was this huge implosion when your father died suddenly. And I don't want to be a pseudo-psychotherapist here at all, but a lot of people who I speak to who are very successful later in life have some sort of trauma, and it is often an absent parent or a parent who has died. And I wonder what effect that had on you and your drive, your ambition, if any? Well, of course, the ambition was already there,

because, as I said, and you said, our parents did take it for granted that we would go to university if we could. Now, we're talking the 50s here, and only about two and a half percent of girls between the ages of 18 and 21 went to university. So it was quite an ambition for them to have, but it was taken for granted. And that came from both my parents. So the shock of my father dying very suddenly, not unlike the way that Julian did it, but it took him a little bit longer, at the age of 49, when I was 13, it was a huge, huge sorrow for us, but it taught us a few things, partly because our mother picked herself up, dusted off her teaching qualifications, got herself a job as head teacher of the primary school to which my younger sister and I had both gone, so that we could stay living

in the same village, with the same friends, go to the same school. And I think so that she could lead an independent life because she was under some pressure to go home to Leeds to her own mother and her sister who lived there. So I think there were some reasons for her sake that she was doing it, but there were also definitely reasons for us that she was doing it. So she was a huge role model. And the lesson was you must have the tools to lead an independent life. I think that's what both my younger sister and I learned from that experience. She did say that her father, who was also a head teacher, had drummed into her how important it was for her to get her teaching qualifications. And this will have been in the 20s and early 30s,

that sort of first generation of post the emancipation of women just after the First World War or between the wars. And how glad she was that she did indeed have a qualification, which was obviously a valid qualification. And it meant that she could get the job that she did. Lots of lessons there, aren't there? So many. And what a brilliant woman your mother was to be able to do that. Thank you so much for sharing that. How important was grammar school to you? Well, of course, in those days, these were the days when people took the 11 plus exam and depending on one's results in that, their one's educational future lay because you either went to the grammar school, high school, had an academic education and could expect to

go on to university, teacher training, college, trainers and nurse, a variety of professional jobs. The alternative was the secondary modern school, which was not meant to be an inferior education. It was just meant to be a different education. But in fact, it was in many cases an inferior education. And so it was important. And it was for somebody like me from a village background. It was a lovely school in a beautiful town. It's a small school, 160 girls, I think, something like that. Stable population of mainly unmarried women teachers. It was stable because it's such a nice place. And I think we were probably quite agreeable pupils,

most of us, that the teachers tended to stay. Fun piece of trivia. I also did the 11 plus because I grew up in Northern Ireland and it was still a thing there until really quite recently. And it is a terrifying exam to take at that age. I remember being told by a neighbour, this is the most important exam you'll ever take. There was so much pressure on us, all that structured reasoning and oh my goodness, I'm glad I don't have to do it again. Your second failure is not getting a scholarship to read for the bar so for the uninitiated amongst us who don't understand legal terminology what does that mean? Well in order to become a barrister you have to join an inner court, you have to ask the far final examination, as it was then called, which you tend to do shortly after you've graduated, if you've graduated with a law degree. And when I

was qualifying, you have to eat 36 dinners in your inner court. That is a minimum of three dinners a term, four terms a year for three years. And because of that, most of the people whom I knew at Cambridge who were planning to go to the bar joined an Inn of Court in their first year, which meant they could then get their dinners eaten, take the exams and be immediately qualified shortly after graduating. take the exams and be immediately qualified shortly after graduating so I okay right I haven't any money because it didn't cost a lot of money but I didn't have even the money that it cost so I thought okay I'll apply to one of the Inns of Court for a scholarship and I can remember going down on the train from Cambridge to London there was another contemporary whom I knew on the same train and when we were all waiting to be interviewed I can another contemporary whom I knew on the same train. And when we were all waiting to be interviewed, I can remember his saying, I had an excellent breakfast on the train.

Of course, in those days, you could get breakfast on the train. And I can remember thinking, this is not my world. I wouldn't dream of buying breakfast on a train. Anyway, that was just the beginning. And then I go into the interview. And of course, for me, now I'm aged 18, 19, maybe there's a horseshoe of what appeared to me to be ancient men. They won't have been as ancient as all that,

but they will certainly have been elderly, most of them. I hadn't started yet, because it was my first year getting the first class marks in my examinations I think they were wondering what the earth is she doing here this little girl from North Yorkshire I probably still had a contract as well which won't have helped so I'm not really surprised that they didn't offer me a scholarship I was rather surprised when somebody who did get a scholarship was the son of a judge and didn't offer me a scholarship. I was rather surprised when somebody who did get a scholarship was the son of a judge and didn't get as good academic results as I had got. Right.

So I thought, yes, right, what are the criteria here? And he probably bought himself many breakfasts on the train. Well, it wasn't the same. It wasn't the same man. It's a type. No, a type. No, no, the man on the train with the breakfast is a good friend. You mentioned there that you probably still had your North Yorkshire accent, which didn't help.

And you don't have that accent anymore. Can you tell us a bit more about why it was important to speak a certain way? Well, I think that it was then pretty important to have received pronunciation. I think that I did what an awful lot of children do, which is have two different accents, one for home and one for school, so that the Yorkshire accent would be much more pronounced at school where everybody was speaking that way than it was at home. But I expect there was a certain northern twinge at home. But the North Yorkshire accent is very different from the South and West Yorkshire accent. It's much closer to the Durham accent, which is a much softer version of Geordie. And so it's not as apparent,

and I think it's easier to lose track of when you're spending your time with people who speak differently. And I think I've just always picked up the way in which the people I am with are speaking. In fact, I can remember one of my Gertman friends roaring with laughter during some conversation. And I said, what on earth are you laughing at? She said, the way you're speaking, just like X is speaking. So I think I might have a bit of an ear. How class ridden is the legal system now? And was it different then? Oh, it was very different then. The bar was dominated by men from public schools and leading universities and to some extent they are still overrepresented but

there are many more people from a much wider range of backgrounds who've been going into the law over the course of my professional life. Access to the justice system has been improved until recently, and with it, access to the legal profession, because the more people are going to law, using the law, needing the law, the more people they need to help them with it. And so the two went more or less hand in hand, and you will now find lots of people in the law who don't speak with the so-called received pronunciation you will now find lots of people in the law who don't speak with the so-called received pronunciation. You'll find lots of people in the law from less obviously advantaged backgrounds. And that's a very, very good thing. It's essential, I think, for democracy.

But I wouldn't like to say that things are yet perfect. And what do you think not getting a scholarship at the age of 19 to read for the bar taught you? Well, I think at that stage, it taught me several things, one of which was, perhaps this isn't for me, another of which might have been, but why shouldn't it be for me? And another would be, well, you better sharpen your act, young woman, another would be, well, you better sharpen your act, young woman, and do better. And the reason that I went to teach at the University of Manchester after graduating was that Manchester said, we would like you to qualify as a barrister, and we would like you to do some part-time practice as a barrister, as well as doing your teaching, because they thought that knowing something about

how the law worked on the ground would actually be of assistance in my educating the young, as indeed it was. And that was the reason that I chose Manchester rather than another place, which had also offered me a post. So I think that failure taught me, well, you better do better and try another route. And is that a general mindset for you? If someone says no, or you're not good enough, or you can't do this, your response will be, watch me. Sometimes. There could be things that I would know that I would never be any cat, like sport. Right, yes.

So if somebody tells me, no, Brenda Brenda you really cannot hit a tennis ball probably not strongly enough or you cannot wield a hockey stick with the accuracy which we require I think I would say okay right I'll find another way of keeping fit but with the law am I right in saying you don't have that sense? With the law, you think, no, I know what I'm doing here. There are, of course, many different ways of using the law. I mean, I have spent a little bit of time in solicitor's offices. I've spent some time at the bar. I've spent a lot of time as an academic lawyer, as a law reformer, and as a judge. So there are many different ways of being in the law. And that's one of the great attractions of it, because many different sorts of people can

find a happy life in it. If you're a good negotiator, well, then you can go into transactional work and be a great success. If you're a good advocate, well, then you'll go either into solicitor advocacy or into the bar, and you'll be a great success. There are lots of different ways of making a success in the world. Something for everyone. When you were at Gerson College, Cambridge, were you ever naughty? I don't remember staying out beyond midnight more than a handful of times while I was there. So no, I wasn't very naughty. I suppose you just have a respect for rules and for laws, don't you? It sort of goes to the core of who you are.

You can sort of have some mischief within that, but you're not going to break any rules. I am generally law abiding. This is true. Some of that, of course, is self-preservation. It's not going to be my massive scoop that I suddenly discover that you've done lots of illegal things. So I'll take that one off my question list. Your third failure, you were generous enough to give me two options and I suppose I want to ask you about both but let's start with not getting three professorships for which you applied during your Manchester years and this was when you were in your 30s so what happened there and why do you think you failed well I probably failed all three of them because

there was a better candidate, or of course, a candidate who was perceived to be better by the people who were making the appointments. They were all men, of course. Ah, well, that's interesting, isn't it? Yeah, it is. It is quite interesting. I think first one, I was then quite young and hadn't got a hugely long CV. And also there was somebody already in the university on the staff who was not unlike me in academic interests and profile. So it's very understandable that they didn't appoint me. By the third one, I think, although the person they did appoint was very, very good, I think I was a pretty strong candidate. And I think from something that one of the people on the appointing committee actually said that their perception of me as a woman was part of that. at. We'd had lunch together and I had gone out of my way to try and have an interesting conversation with this particular person. And she said over lunch, I had expressed some very definite opinions. I don't think I had expressed any definite opinions. I think it was just her perception

that this was a woman who was speaking up. In fact, I was pretty nonplussed by it because I thought I'd been trying to have a reasonable, intelligent conversation about things that should interest her. That's what I always try to do, to find out what interests the person with whom I'm having a conversation. And she translated that as pretty definite opinions. It's an example, perhaps, of how a woman might be perceived differently from a man, or it might be an example of how I actually am. It's very interesting that it was another woman who potentially made that judgment. Yes.

And I think we've all had to look at the extent of our internalized sexism in a way, because even women get used to thinking another woman shouldn't quote unquote, have these strong opinions or shouldn't be this way or shouldn't be bossy and shouldn't be strident. Yes, that is true. How discriminated against have you felt in your career? You write about this era of your life in your book, and you say that everyday discrimination was rife. What are some examples of that? Well, I cannot pretend that I myself have felt greatly discriminated against. When I have failed to get a post for which I've applied, I have understood why I haven't got it. And so on that level, I wouldn't want to be seen as complaining. But in the era before the Sex Discrimination Act 1975, there was lots of everyday discrimination against women. was a bar in a pub in Manchester, to which when we left barrister's chambers in the evening,

we might go and have a drink. Not always, of course, but sometimes, no problem. It also did bar lunches. And so one day I popped along there with a view to having a lunch and was turned away. No, we don't let women in at lunchtime. Another example was a student of mine who didn't want to go into the law, although she was a good law student. And so she applied for a job with an insurance company and was told, oh, yes, you can have a job. You will be paid two thirds of what a man doing the same job will pay. And a third example is a very distinguished scholar who came to be a professor at Manchester University and obviously wanted to buy a house, wanted a mortgage and was told that she had to have a male guarantor of her mortgage. Three examples of everyday discrimination, all of which of course became instantly unlawful

with the Sex Discrimination Act of 1975. I'm not saying that act was perfect or that it's been perfectly translated into practice, but it did stop each of those three things. And while you were pursuing this incredibly high level career, you also became a mother yourself. And you write about this in Spider Woman, you had your daughter, Julia, and she was four weeks premature, although eight weeks immature, I think is the right terminology. I mean, that's a very emotionally stressful thing to go through. How was that for you, going through that at a time when potentially you might have felt that you needed to keep your private life private because of everything we've just been discussing? Yes. Well, of course, one of the reasons why I

chose after a few years of doing both practice and teaching to concentrate on my academic career was that it was apparent that it was much easier to combine an academic career with having a family than it was to combine practice at the bar with having a family. I was fortunate enough to be the second permanent full-time woman member of staff at Manchester University. And the first woman who'd been there, I think, seven or eight years before me, had two children and had blazed the trail for having maternity leave and so on at the university. And so I expected to continue with my career at the university once I'd had my daughter, and indeed was very anxious to get back to it. And at that stage, I hadn't done anything very much to write home about. I'd only had a couple of publications, I think, because I'd been concentrating on my practice at the bar.

So what having my daughter and deciding to concentrate on academic life did for me was to encourage me to make a success of that academic life. And it's after that that I started writing books and doing the things which bit by bit led to my public life. And it's after that, that I started writing books and doing the things which bit by bit led to my public life. My daughter says that one of her earliest memories is falling asleep to the sound of my typewriter. I absolutely love hearing that. I think it's such an important thing for other women who want to be parents to hear that actually having a child can fuel your ambition and make you more focused in your professional life in certain ways because I think we're just fed so much guff about motherhood and about how it completes you in a way nothing else will and how you'll be forever changed afterwards and of course it must

change you in many respects but I think that that's a wonderful thing to hear that it wasn't a question for you of juggling one against the other it feels like there was a great synthesis there is that fair yes no it isn't there I'm not sure that I knew it at the time it's just the way things turned out and I had a lot of encouragement as well. I would love to talk to you about your 2011 judgment, which you're an integral part of, which established that domestic violence does not have to be physical. It can be a matter of coercive control. And so much of your legal work and so much of what you've done has been guided by your feminist principles. And I think this, personally speaking, was hugely important. And I really just want to thank you for that. Tell us what coercive control is.

Well, it's using one's dominant position in order to exercise complete control over the other person. There are lots of ways of doing it, but anybody who has listened to the Archers and remembers Helen Archer's time with Rob could see what was going on. He deprived her of her job. He deprived her of contact with her family and her friends. He deprived her of her mobile phone. And bit by bit, he made her feel that everything was her fault, that she was mentally unstable. He made her marry him in secret.

He probably made her pregnant as a result of rape, although that's not entirely clear from the script. It was just that whole series of actions which deprived her of agency, independence, and will. And it's that sort of thing. There are many ways of doing it, but it tends to be economic control coupled with psychological domination and the making of a person feel that they have no agency, that there is nothing they can do about it. And it was very important to be able to recognise that as encompassed within the concept of violence. And my male colleagues agreed. When you're confronted with a judgment like that, with individual cases that carry within them

stories of great trauma, how do you cope? Because I imagine in some respects, doing what you do is a bit like being a therapist in which you have to analyze and take on people's stories, but you also need to be extremely clear-sighted as to what this means from a professional perspective, in your case, a legal perspective. How do you divide the empathy from the professionalism? Or perhaps you don't? What you have to try and be, particularly if, as I was for five and a half years, you're a family judge dealing with family problems, you have to have empathy for what the family members are going through, all of them. But at the same time, you have to be sufficiently detached to be able to make an objective judgment about what the right solution for that family is. There's no right solution usually with these troubled families,

but the least worst. It's like being a doctor, isn't it? I mean, doctors have, or good doctors, can empathise with their patients and they need to be able to do that in order to be able to understand what the patient is trying to say to them and to make a good diagnosis.

But at the same time, they have to be objective. They have to reach an objective conclusion, not necessarily the one that the patient wants. I think this is why doctors and lawyers do understand one another pretty well, because we all have that same necessity to combine empathy and professionalism. I can't tell you how you do it. You just have to learn to do it. You just do it. I'm going to ask you a question. I think it's going to annoy you. Do you ever cry? Oh, I certainly cry at personal things, family things. I cried quite a lot last July. And from time to time, I still feel like crying. But I don't remember crying in connection

with a case. I remember worrying quite a lot. When I was in the family division, it was the family cases that occasionally did give me sleepless nights, because these are very big decisions, particularly when you're deciding whether to take a child, a baby, away from her mother, or when you're deciding that the family can have the child back, despite the risks that there may be in that. These are big decisions. And so sometimes they cause difficulty. I don't think I cried over them, but I did agonize over them. Is there any one case that haunts you still? Yes, there probably is. And one of the difficulties is that you don't know the result, the long-term outcome. This is true of judges generally. We are not told what happened next. of complicity in the manslaughter of an earlier child and who now had another child some years

later with a different partner and was receiving the sort of help that she needed to understand herself and her actions and the safe decision undoubtedly would have been to take the child away from her permanently and I thought about it overnight. It helps a lot to be able to write things down. The great thing about judging is that you have to give a judgment to explain yourself. You have to reason it out. And I couldn't write a judgment taking the child away from her. Every time I looked at the arguments, it seemed that they didn't justify that conclusion. And so I allowed her to have the child, albeit under some constraints. I've no idea what happened, but that is the sort of decision that we as judges are paid to make. It's difficult for

social workers to take the risk because they get so much back. But it's for us to take an objective eye to things, reason it out, and if appropriate, to take a risk. And given that you have handled all of these very nuanced, complicated cases that carry such emotional weight, are you, Lady Hale, more optimistic or pessimistic about human beings and their capacity for change, I suppose? Oh, I think I'm a cockeyed optimist and always have been. Excellent. I always have been. Definitely a glass half full rather than a glass half empty. You became the first Fianwan president of the Supreme Court, but you also failed the first time you tried. Can you just tell us about that? In retrospect, just as with those professorships, I am glad I didn't get the job.

I'm glad I didn't get the professorships because if I had got one of them, I would not have applied to the Law Commission. I wouldn't have gone to the Law Commission. I wouldn't then have gone on the bench. I'm sure I would have stayed in academic life until I retired. So they did me a favour by turning me down for the presidency of the Supreme Court when first I applied for it, because I learned a great deal from Gordon Newburger, who did get the job, about how to do it better than I would have done it had I got the job when he did. And I hope that I benefited from that. So I think it was the best of both worlds, really. Although he was a man, I'm guessing that you won't attribute the fact that you failed to get it then to sexism. I don't know. I don't think so. I don't think so. It might have been more to do with my character and personality. People have said that there was a Stop Brenda campaign going on behind the scenes. I know

nothing about that. I don't know whether that is true or not. Pesky Lord Hope again. I'm just joking. And did it feel really good then when you did become President of the Supreme Court? Did you celebrate? Well, I'm sure I celebrated in some modest fashion, nothing too showy. I mentioned in my introduction that you've been dubbed the Beyonce of the legal profession. Have you ever listened to Beyonce? Oh, yes. Well, that's a very, very good question. It was Legal Cheek, you know, which is a website which does some fun things about law, which I think dubbed me the Beyonce of the legal world. I think that was probably to do with the fact that I tend to be quite popular amongst young law people.

Students tend to like my judgments, partly because they're quite short and easy to read, and maybe because they like the content as well. And they like it when I go and speak to them or do a Q&A with them, things like that. So I think that's where that came from, general popularity amongst the young. But of course, although I knew who Beyonce was, I couldn't recall having listened to any of her music. Quite recently, somebody sent me some CDs with her music. And what I have found is that the words of some of her songs are really quite powerful. There's one called If I Were a Boy, which is really very powerful. And there are others too, but that's the one that comes to mind. But on the whole, the music possibly isn't my kind of music. It's all a bit repetitive. kind of music it's all a bit repetitive oh lady haley you have made my day the thought of you listening to if i were a boy by beyonce is just the most wonderful image it really is i'm so glad you've listened to beyonce and now the question is does beyonce know who you are so when i get

to speak to her on how to fail i shall ask her um just finally i wonder whether you have a favourite fictional representation of a lawyer or a judge? Well, you mentioned Ian McEwan's book, The Children Act, which mysteriously arrived in my in-tray the day it was published. Well, I enjoyed the book a lot, and it's pretty accurate. It's basically about the life of a family division judge portrayed in the film by Emma Thompson extremely well. And so I think if I had a fictional character in the lore, it would be the woman judge in the Children Act. for everything you have done for this country, but particularly for women in this country, particularly for people from different kinds of backgrounds. And I also want to thank you for coming on How to Fail and being such a wonderful, enlightening guest.

I cannot thank you enough for your time. Well, you're far, far too kind to me, but thank you. I have enjoyed it. This episode of How to Fail is sponsored by CB2, feel good, CBD. Are you one of the 44% of Brits that gets six hours or fewer of sleep each night. 23% of female Britons record that they feel tired all the time, followed by 35% who feel tired often. I feel their pain. CB2 have hundreds of reviews about how their CBD oil has changed people's lives for quality sleep, for managing symptoms of stress and anxiety, as well as supporting body aches and pains.

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