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.
Jonathan Sumption was born on 9 December 1948. He is the eldest of the four children of Anthony Sumption,[10] a decorated naval officer and barrister,and Hilda Hedigan;their marriage was dissolved in 1979.[11] He was educated at Eton College,where at 15 he was at the bottom of his class.[12] He read Medieval History at Magdalen College,Oxford,from 1967 to 1970,graduating with a first.[13][14][15] He was elected a fellow of Magdalen College,teaching and writing books on medieval history from 1971 to 1975 before leaving to pursue a career in law.[13][15]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.[16][17] 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.[18] 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".[17]
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.[13][22] 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.[22]
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 class action in the UK,brought by 49,500 private shareholders of the collapsed national railway infrastructure company Railtrack.[23] 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 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.[24]
After his retirement,Sumption sat on the Supplementary Panel of the Supreme Court[31] from 13 December 2018 to 30 January 2021.[32] He voluntarily retired in 2021 because he considered it inappropriate to serve on the panel in view of his public criticisms of the government.[33]
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".[38]
He has said that an attempt to rapidly achieve gender equality in the Supreme Court through quotas or 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".[41][42] 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".[43]
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".[38] He believes that history should not be apologised for once perpetrators of injustices are no longer alive,describing apologies for events such as the 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".[44] In the wake of the Black Lives Matterprotests 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".[44]
In 2023,the New Statesman named him as the 47th most influential right-wing figure in British politics.[45]
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"[46] and that,"Britain will be dominated by the European Union whether we belong to it or not".[47] Nevertheless,he believed there were strong arguments for Brexit on the grounds of national sovereignty and identity.[48] He said that leavers,"were not mad. They are not irrational,not naive and have not been deceived".[46] He wrote that,"All of these patronising explanations of their decision seems to me to be mere attempts to evade unpalatable truths."[49]
Judicial review and politics
Sumption has written in detail about his concerns regarding the relationship between the judiciary and politics in several lectures and books,most notably his books Trials of the State:Law and the Decline of Politics (2019) and Law in a Time of Crisis (2021). He argues that since the 1960s,but particularly in recent years,the courts have undermined the political processes and institutions of parliament by judging issues that should be decided by elected politicians and ministers. He specifically critiques the expansion of judicial review,saying that,"It has tended to intrude into areas that belong to parliament and ministers answerable to parliament",[50] and has criticised the interpretative powers conferred by the Human Rights Act 1998. He argues that political figures are more democratically accountable to the public for decisions they make,unlike judges who are unelected and difficult to remove from office. He has criticised the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR),which interprets and adjudicates on the European Convention on Human Rights. He has compared the values of the ECHR and those of the post-war dictatorships of eastern Europe,stating that "they both employ the concept of democracy as a generalised term of approval for a set of political values".[39][51] He describes the text of the convention as "wholly admirable"[52] but argues that the Strasbourg court has interpreted and developed the rights very broadly to go beyond their original meaning and to the extent that the rights cover issues which are properly the remit of elected legislatures. He has criticised the "living instrument" doctrine,particularly regarding Article 8 of the convention,which he describes as,"the most striking example of this kind of mission creep."[53] 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.[54]
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,[55][39] while also criticising the legal basis for their enactment and the enforceability of COVID-19 control measures.[56][57][58][59] 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.[9][60][61][56]
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."[62] 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.[63]
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).[64]
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.[65]
Israel/Palestine
In February 2025,Sumption told the Guardian that he thought there was an arguable case that Israel’s conduct in Gaza was genocidal. He also said he was concerned about moves to suppress freedom of speech for supporters of Palestine,particularly in Germany.[66]
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 Dordogne in the south of France which he describes as "hard to miss [...] about the size of the rest of the village combined."[67][12]
Sumption speaks French and Italian fluently,and reads Spanish,Dutch,Portuguese,Catalan and Latin.[13] He "rarely learned them using guides,instead I preferred to muddle on through a text with a dictionary by my side."[38]
Two books are dedicated to Sumption's contribution to private and public law,respectively.[69] The following cases are an excerpt of his contribution to the law:
Kelly v Fraser [2012] UKPC 25 [15],[2013] 1 AC 450[70] –on apparent authority based on an agent's misrepresentation that the principal had approved the transaction
Williams v Central Bank of Nigeria [2014] UKSC 10,[2014] AC 1189[74] –on the correct construction of the Limitation Act 1980 with important remarks on the nature of constructive trust and a claim of knowing receipt
R (Nicklinson) v Ministry of Justice [2014] UKSC 38,[2015] AC 657[75] –On the compatibility of the prohibition of assisting suicide with the European Convention on Human Rights
Pilgrimage: An Image of Medieval Religion. Faber & Faber. 1975. ISBN0-571-10339-1.; re-issued as The Age of Pilgrimage: The Medieval Journey to God. Paulist Press. 2003. ISBN1-58768-025-4.
↑ For example, Akai Holdings Ltd v Thanakharn Kasikorn Thai Chamkat, FACV16/2009, reported at (2010) 13 HKCFAR 479, and Goldlion Properties Limited v Regent National Enterprises Limited, FACV10/2008, reported at (2009) 12 HKCFAR 512
↑ Quotations from the selection of reviews displayed on the back of The Hundred Years War III: Divided Houses
↑ 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)
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