Lord Sumption Biography

Lord Sumption is a British judge, author, and medieval historian. He was sworn in as a Justice of the Supreme Court on 11 January 2012, succeeding The Lord Collins of Mapesbury. Lord Sumption.

Lord Sumption Age

Jonathan Sumption was born on 9 December 1948. He is 70 years of age. His nationality is British.

Lord Sumption Family

Sumption was the elder son of Anthony Sumption, a decorated naval officer and barrister, and Hilda Hedigan.

Lord Sumption resides with his wife Teresa Sumption in London. the couple is blessed with 3 children 2 boys and 1 girl.

Lord Sumption

Lord Sumption 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. He was called to the bar at Inner Temple in 1975 and subsequently pursued a successful legal practice in commercial law.

Lord Sumption Career

Lord 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 the 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.

In the 1970s, Sumption served as an adviser to the Conservative MP and cabinet minister Keith Joseph, He wrote parts of Joseph’s controversial 1974 Edgbaston speech, which was generally thought to have doomed Joseph’s chances of becoming a leader of the Conservative Party. Sumption and Joseph also co-wrote a 1979 book, Equality, in which they argued 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.

Sumption was appointed Queen’s Counsel (QC) 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.

He has been a member of the Judicial Appointments Commission as well as a Governor of the Royal Academy of Music. Until his appointment to the Supreme Court, he was the joint head of Brick Court Chambers.

On 30 November 2007, when a practicing 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.

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 than comparable individuals in business, sports and entertainment are paid. 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.

 The Government had money and reputation at stake. The case examined some of the actions of the 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.

Lord Sumption  Selected cases

• Lonrho Ltd v Shell Petroleum Co Ltd (No 1) [1980] QB 358 (subsidiary companies)
• Lipkin Gorman v Karpnale Ltd [1987] 1 WLR 987
• R v Panel on Takeovers and Mergers Ex parte Datafin Plc [1987] QB 815
• Powdrill v Watson [1995] 2 AC 394
• Re Goldcorp Exchange Ltd [1995] 1 AC 74
• Target Holdings Ltd v Redferns [1996] AC 421
• Westdeutsche Landesbank Girozentrale v Islington LBC [1996] AC 669
• Smith New Court Securities Ltd v Citibank NA [1997] AC 254 (fraud, misrepresentation)
• South Australia Asset Management Corp v York Montague Ltd [1997] AC 191
• Bristol & West Building Society v Mathew [1998] Ch 1
• Investors Compensation Scheme Ltd v West Bromwich Building Society [1998] 1 WLR 896
• Equitable Life Assurance v Hyman [2000] 2 All ER 331
• Philip Morris Products Inc v Rothmans International Enterprises Ltd [2000] UKCLR 912 (company groups, voting rights)
• Royal Bank of Scotland plc v Etridge (No 2) [2001] UKHL 44
• Dubai Aluminium Co Ltd v Salaam [2002] UKHL 48
• HIH Casualty & General Insurance Ltd v Chase Manhattan Bank [2003] UKHL 6
• Marcic v Thames Water Utilities Ltd [2003] UKHL 66
• Wilson v First County Trust [2003] UKHL 40
• Three Rivers District Council v Bank of England [2004] 3 WLR 1274 (about the collapse of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International)
• Office of Fair Trading v Abbey National plc [2009] UKSC 6, won, representing the Barclays Bank plc.
• Stone & Rolls v Moore Stephens [2009] UKHL 39, won, representing the accountants

Lord Sumption Articles

Sumption, Jonathan (4 October 2008). “The pragmatic approach”. The Spectator. 308 (9397): 38. Archived from the original on 12 January 2009. Retrieved 23 December 2008. Review of Patten, Chris (2008). What next? Surviving the Twenty-First Century. Allen Lane. ISBN 978-0-7139-9856-6.

Lectures

• The Limits of Law (2013). Lord Sumption gives the 27th Sultan Azlan Shah Lecture, Kuala. Lumpur. “The Limits of Law” (PDF). UK Supreme Court. Retrieved 7 August 2015.
• Law and the Decline of Politics (2019). Lord Sumption gives the 2019 BBC Reith Lectures “Law and the Decline of Politics”. BBC. Retrieved 7 August 2019.