Jonathan Sumption

Jonathan Philip Chadwick Sumption, Lord Sumption, (born 9 December 1948), is a British author, medieval historian, barrister and former senior judge who sat on the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom between 2012 and 2018, and a Non-Permanent Judge of the Hong Kong Court of Final Appeal from 2019 to 2024.

Sumption was sworn in as a Justice of the Supreme Court on 11 January 2012, succeeding Lawrence Collins, Baron Collins of Mapesbury. 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.

Sumption is well known for his role as a barrister in many legal cases. They include appearances in the Hutton Inquiry on HM Government's behalf, in the Three Rivers case, his representation of former Cabinet Minister Stephen Byers and the 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 Boris Berezovsky.

A former academic, Sumption was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2003 New Year Honours and is also known for writing a substantial narrative history of the Hundred Years' War in five volumes. Sumption has been elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society (FRHistS) and a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London (FSA). In 2019, he was appointed a Fellow of the Society of Writers to Her Majesty's Signet (FWS).

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Sumption criticised lockdowns and associated British government policies as economically harmful.

Early life and education

Jonathan Sumption was born on 9 December 1948. He is the eldest of the four children of Anthony Sumption, a decorated naval officer and barrister, and Hilda Hedigan; their marriage was dissolved in 1979. He was educated at Eton College, where at 15 he was at the bottom of his class. He read Medieval History at Magdalen College, Oxford, from 1967 to 1970, graduating with a first. 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. 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. 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. 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 joined Brick Court Chambers in 1975, where he remained for the entirety of his commercial legal career as a barrister. He 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. In 2005, Sumption became joint head of Brick Court Chambers. He was a member of the Judicial Appointments Commission until his appointment to the Supreme Court.

On 30 November 2007, when a practising barrister, Sumption successfully represented himself before Mr Justice Collins in a judicial review application in the Administrative Court concerning proposed 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 (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 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.

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 judicial courtesy title of Lord Sumption pursuant to a royal warrant (by which all members of the Supreme Court, even if they do not hold a peerage title, are accorded the style of "Lord" ''for life'').

Sumption was sworn of the Privy Council on 14 December 2011 in advance of his joining the Court, whose Justices also serve 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 (1887), Lord Carson (1921) and Lord Radcliffe (1949).

After his retirement, Sumption sat on the Supplementary Panel of the Supreme Court from 13 December 2018 to 30 January 2021. He voluntarily retired in 2021 because he considered it inappropriate to serve on the panel in view of his public criticisms of the government.

On 13 December 2019, Sumption was appointed as a Non-Permanent Judge of the Court of Final Appeal in Hong Kong by Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam. After making his pledge of allegiance to the Hong Kong SAR of the People's Republic of China as part of the judicial oath, Lord Sumption officially commenced his office as a Hong Kong judge on 18 December 2019. He had previously appeared as counsel in the Court of Final Appeal in a number of cases. On 6 June 2024, Lord Sumption resigned as a Non-Permanent Judge together with Lord Collins of Mapesbury, citing the political situation.

Historian

The Hundred Years' War

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".
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 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".

Views

Sumption has been described as a "conservative neo-liberal and libertarian." In 1974, he worked with Conservative MP Sir Keith Joseph at the Centre for Policy Studies, an economically liberal think-tank. However, he was a Labour supporter at the time and later voted for Tony Blair.

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". 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".

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". 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". In the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests 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".

In 2023, the ''New Statesman'' named him as the 47th most influential right-wing figure in British politics.

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" and that, "Britain will be dominated by the European Union whether we belong to it or not". Nevertheless, he believed there were strong arguments for Brexit on the grounds of national sovereignty and identity. He said that leavers, "were not mad. They are not irrational, not naive and have not been deceived". He wrote that, "All of these patronising explanations of their decision seems to me to be mere attempts to evade unpalatable truths."

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", 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". He describes the text of the convention as "wholly admirable" 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." 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.

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, while also criticising the legal basis for their enactment and the enforceability of COVID-19 control measures. 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.

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." 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.

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).

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.

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.

In May 2025, Sumption was one of more than 800 signatories to a letter to Keir Starmer saying that the UK should sanction the Israeli government for "war crimes, crimes against humanity and serious violations of international humanitarian law" which they said are being committed in Palestine.

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."

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

* The Rt Hon Lord Sumption,

Notable cases

As counsel

*'' Lipkin Gorman v Karpnale Ltd'' 9871 WLR 987
*'' R v Panel on Takeovers and Mergers Ex parte Datafin Plc'' 987QB 815
*'' Powdrill v Watson'' 9952 AC 394
*'' Re Goldcorp Exchange Ltd'' 9951 AC 74
*'' Target Holdings Ltd v Redferns'' 996AC 421
*'' Westdeutsche Landesbank Girozentrale v Islington LBC'' 996AC 669
*'' Smith New Court Securities Ltd v Citibank NA'' 997AC 254 (fraud, misrepresentation)
*'' South Australia Asset Management Corp v York Montague Ltd'' 997AC 191
*'' Bristol & West Building Society v Mothew'' 998Ch 1
*'' Investors Compensation Scheme Ltd v West Bromwich Building Society'' 9981 WLR 896
*'' Royal Bank of Scotland plc v Etridge (No 2)'' 001UKHL 44
*'' Dubai Aluminium Co Ltd v Salaam'' 002UKHL 48
*'' HIH Casualty & General Insurance Ltd v Chase Manhattan Bank'' 003UKHL 6
*'' 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

As judge

Two books are dedicated to Sumption's contribution to private and public law, respectively. The following cases are an excerpt of his contribution to the law:
* ''Kelly v Fraser'' [2012] UKPC 25 [15], 0131 AC 450 – on apparent authority based on an agent's misrepresentation that the principal had approved the transaction
* ''Prest v Petrodel Resources Ltd, Prest v Petrodel Resources Ltd & Ors'' 013UKSC 34, 0132 AC 415 – on piercing the corporate veil
* '' Bank Mellat v Her Majesty's Treasury (No. 2)'' 013UKSC 39, 0141 AC 700 – On the test of proportionality and the lawfulness of the UK government's sanctions of Bank Mellat
* '' Virgin Atlantic Airways Ltd v Premium Aircraft Interiors UK Ltd'' 013UKSC 46, 014AC 160 – on the rule of res judicata
* '' Williams v Central Bank of Nigeria'' 014UKSC 10, 014AC 1189 – on the correct construction of the Limitation Act 1980 with important remarks on the nature of constructive trust and a claim of knowing receipt
*'' Coventry v Lawrence'' 014UKSC 13
* '' R (Nicklinson) v Ministry of Justice'' 014UKSC 38, 015AC 657 – On the compatibility of the prohibition of assisting suicide with the European Convention on Human Rights
* '' R (Lord Carlile of Berriew) v Secretary of State for the Home Department'' 014UKSC 60, 015AC 945 – the role of the courts when applying the proportionality test in cases concerning interferences with qualified human rights
* '' Pham v Secretary of State for the Home Department'' 015UKSC 19, 0151 WLR 1591 – on the development of the common law test of unreasonableness and its relationship with the proportionality test
* '' Bilta (UK) Ltd v Nazir (No 2)'' 015UKSC 23, 016AC 1 – on the rules of attribution in company law
* '' Papadimitriou v Crédit Agricole Corpn and Investment Bank'' 015UKPC 13, 0151 WLR 4265 – On the fault requirement necessary for liability in knowing receipt
* '' Bunge SA v Nidera BV'' 015UKSC 43, 0153 All ER 1082 – on the proper assessment date of contractual damages
* '' Cavendish Square Holding BV v Talal El Makdessi (Rev 3)'' 015UKSC 67, 016AC 1172 – on the law of penalty and liquidated damages clause
* '' Angove's Pty Ltd v Bailey'' 016UKSC 47, 0161 WLR 3179 – on proprietary restitution
* '' Patel v Mirza'' 016UKSC 42, 017AC 467 – dissenting judgment on illegal contracts
* '' JSC BTA Bank v Ablyazov and another (No 14)'' 018UKSC 19, 020AC 727 – on tort of economic loss (joint judgment with Lord Lloyd-Jones)
* '' Rock Advertising Ltd v MWB Business Exchange Centres Ltd'' 018UKSC 24, 019AC 119 – on the effect of a No Oral Modification clause in a contract

Books

* ; re-issued as
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* with Sir Keith Joseph
* ; paperback (1999)
* ; paperback (2001)
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References

Notes

Citations

Sources

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External links

Brick Court Chambers information
Accessed 30 December 2022.
"People of Today"
debretts.com. Accessed 30 December 2022.

supremecourt.gov.uk. Accessed 30 December 2022.

{{DEFAULTSORT:Sumption, Jonathan Sumption, Lord
1948 births
Alumni of Magdalen College, Oxford
English male writers
English King's Counsel
People educated at Eton College
Fellows of Magdalen College, Oxford
Fellows of the Royal Historical Society
Fellows of the Society of Antiquaries of London
Judges of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom
Judiciary of Jersey
Justices of the Court of Final Appeal (Hong Kong)
Living people
Members of the Inner Temple
Members of the Privy Council of the United Kingdom
Officers of the Order of the British Empire
Wolfson History Prize winners