Alumni Festival: CWIL 'In Conversation with Dame Vivien Rose of the Supreme Court'

As part of the Cambridge Women in Law series, we are delighted to welcome Dame Vivien Rose back to Cambridge to share details of her long and fascinating legal career. More details to follow.

This session will be followed by tea and coffee from 3.15pm until 3.45pm.

Speaker: Dame Vivien Rose (Newnham 1979)

Dame Vivien Rose is one of the 11 Justices of the Supreme Court, which hears cases of the greatest public or constitutional importance in the UK. This follows a distinguished legal career, much of it in the Civil Service.

Lady Rose practised as a barrister at Monckton Chambers for ten years, specialising in EU and UK competition law. She served as a legal adviser on financial services at HM Treasury until 2001, including steering through and implementing the giant Financial Services and Markets Act 2000. In 2002 she was appointed to the Senior Civil Service and moved to the Ministry of Defence as Director of Operational and International Humanitarian Law. From 2005 to 2008 she was seconded to the Office of Counsel to the Speaker of the House of Commons.

In 2006 she was appointed to her first judicial role as a fee-paid Chairman of the Competition Appeal Tribunal. She was appointed to further tribunal posts and became a Recorder in the criminal jurisdiction, South Eastern circuit in 2010. In May 2013 Dame Vivien was sworn in as a High Court Judge in the Chancery Division, presiding over cases covering the full range of Chancery work, including trademarks for champagne and cycling gear, directors’ fraud, probate and insolvency law, and competition law.

Lady Rose was President of the Upper Tribunal (Tax and Chancery Chamber) between 2015 and 2018 and was a nominated judge of the Financial List from its inception. She received the 2017 Lifetime Achievement Award by Euromoney Institutional Investor Legal Media Group as part of their annual Europe Women in Business Law Awards. She was appointed to the Court of Appeal in January 2019.

In April 2021, Lady Rose was appointed to the Supreme Court, the fourth woman to be appointed in the Court’s history.

Dame Vivien read Law at Newnham College, Cambridge (1979), and later attended Brasenose College, Oxford to read for the BCL from 1982.

For more information and booking (from 6 July) see the Alumni Festival website.