We are delighted to announce that Lady Arden of Heswall is joining the Faculty of Law as Yorke Distinguished Visiting Fellow for three years from the Easter Term.
Lady Arden grew up in Liverpool and read law at Girton College (matriculating in 1965, and completing her LLM in 1985) and Harvard Law School. After being called to the Bar in 1971 she became a Queen's Counsel in 1986 and served as Attorney General of the Duchy of Lancaster between 1991 and 1993. She served on the Court of Appeal of England and Wales from 2000 to 2018 and was a Justice of the United Kingdom Supreme Court from 2018 to 2022.
Her judicial career began in 1993 when she was appointed to the High Court of Justice of England and Wales as the first woman judge assigned to the Chancery Division. Alongside her judicial experience, she has written extensively on how the law keeps pace with social change. Her two-volume book Shaping Tomorrow's Law was published in 2015. It drew strongly on her knowledge of law reform, which she began to develop while serving as Chair of the Law Commission of England and Wales from 1996 to 1999.
Between 2005 and September 2018, Lady Arden was Judge in Charge, Head of International Judicial Relations for England and Wales. She became a Member of the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague in 2011, and is an ad hoc UK judge of the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.
Lady Arden was also recently been made a member of the Committee on Standards in Public Life.
Yorke Distinguished Visiting Fellows are invited to participate in the intellectual life of the Faculty of Law in a variety of ways, including through the work of the Faculty's research centres and the Yorke Distinguished Visiting Fellow Seminars. Lady Arden joins the Faculty’s existing group of Yorke Distinguishing Visiting Fellows, including Baroness Hale, Lord Carnwath and Lord Lloyd Jones. Lady Hale has already contributed to the Faculty in a number of ways, including the launch of the Cambridge Women in Law (CWIL) network in 2019.