Jonathan Sumption, Lord Sumption


Jonathan Philip Chadwick Sumption, Lord Sumption, , is a British author, medieval historian and former senior judge.
Sumption was sworn in as a Justice of the Supreme Court on 11 January 2012, succeeding The Lord Collins of Mapesbury. Exceptionally, he was raised to the Supreme Court bench directly from the practising at the Bar, rather than the more usual route of having been 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 barrister in many legal cases. They include appearances in the Hutton Inquiry on the UK Government's behalf, in the Three Rivers case, his representation of former Cabinet Minister Stephen Byers and the UK Department for Transport in the Railtrack private shareholders' action against the British Government in 2005, for defending HM Government in an appeal hearing brought by Binyam Mohamed, and for successfully defending Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich in a private lawsuit brought by Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky.
A former academic, Sumption was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in the 2003 New Year Honours and is also known for writing a substantial narrative history of the Hundred Years' War, so far in four volumes. Sumption has been elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London.

Early life and education

Sumption was the elder son of Anthony Sumption, a decorated naval officer and barrister, and Hilda Hedigan; their marriage was dissolved in 1979. He was educated at Eton College and Magdalen College, Oxford, graduating in 1970 with a first in History. He was elected a fellow of Magdalen College, teaching and writing books on medieval history before leaving to pursue a career in law. 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. 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". In the late 1970s Sumption was a regular contributor to The Sunday Telegraph.

Legal career

Sumption was appointed Queen's Counsel in 1986 at the relatively young age of 38, and elected a Bencher of the Inner Temple in 1991. He has served as a Deputy High Court Judge in the Chancery Division, and a Judge of the Court of Appeal of Jersey and the Guernsey Court of Appeal.
A member of the Judicial Appointments Commission, until his appointment to the Supreme Court, Sumption was joint head of Brick Court Chambers.
On 30 November 2007, when a practising barrister, Sumption successfully represented himself before Lord Justice Collins in a judicial review application in the Administrative Court concerning development near his home at Greenwich.

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. 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.
For a four-week trial in the UK in 2005 he charged £800,000 to represent HM Government in the largest class action in the UK, brought by 49,500 private shareholders of the collapsed national railway infrastructure company Railtrack. The Government had money and reputation at stake, the case examining some of the actions of HM Government, especially of former Transport Secretary Stephen Byers. Byers became the only former Cabinet Minister to be cross-examined in the High Court in relation to his actions in modern times: the UK Government won the case.

Judicial career

On 4 May 2011 Sumption's appointment as a Justice of the Supreme Court was announced. Upon his subsequent swearing-in on 11 January 2012, he assumed the title of Lord Sumption pursuant to a Royal Warrant. Sumption was sworn of the Privy Council on 14 December 2011 in advance of his joining the Court, whose Justices double as members of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. He retired from the Supreme Court on 9 December 2018.
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 Law Lords to the Court's predecessor, the Appellate Committee of the House of Lords. Two were Scots lawyers: Lord Macmillan in 1930 and Lord Reid in 1948; the others were: Lord Macnaghten, Lord Carson and Lord Radcliffe.
After his retirement, Sumption was appointed as a Non-Permanent Judge of the Hong Kong Court of Final Appeal on 18 December 2019. He had previously appeared as counsel in the Hong Kong Court of Final Appeal in a number of cases.

Historian

The Hundred Years' War

Sumption's narrative history of the Hundred Years' War between England and France has been widely praised as "earning a place alongside Sir 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" ; 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".
Five volumes are planned. Volume I was first published in 1990. Volume II was published in 1999. Volume III appeared in 2009. Volume IV appeared in 2015, the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Agincourt.
Sumption has been praised for a clipped and polished prose style, which he credits to his unwillingness to employ cliché. He admires Gibbon but points out "if anybody wrote like him today they’d be dismissed as a pompous fart".

Political views

Sumption said that an attempt to rapidly achieve gender equality in the Supreme Court through quotas or positive discrimination could end up discouraging male applicants and so "have appalling consequences for justice".
He has criticised the historical curriculum in English schools as "appallingly narrow", warning that by forcing English schoolchildren to study 1918–1945 in isolation they "are being taught about Germany and Europe during its most aberrant period".
On The World at One on 30 March 2020, he strongly criticised the British government's response to the coronavirus pandemic: "So, yes, this is serious. And, yes, it's understandable that people cry out to the government. But the real question is: is this serious enough to warrant putting most of our population into house imprisonment, wrecking our economy for an indefinite period, destroying businesses that honest and hard-working people have taken years to build up, saddling future generations with debt? Depression, stress, heart attacks, suicides, and unbelievable distress inflicted on millions of people who are not especially vulnerable and will suffer only mild symptoms or none at all, like the Health Secretary and the Prime Minister".
In The Sunday Times of 17 May 2020 he further remarked that "ree people make mistakes and willingly take risks. If we hold politicians responsible for everything that goes wrong, they will take away our liberty so that nothing can go wrong. They will do this not for our protection against risk, but for their own protection against criticism".

Pastimes

Sumption speaks French and Italian fluently, and reads Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, Catalan and Latin. He "rarely learned them using guides, instead I preferred to muddle on through a text with a dictionary by my side".
An opera lover, he serves as a Director of the English National Opera and as a Governor of the Royal Academy of Music.

Full style

As counsel