Lord Reed

Upon his appointment as president of the Supreme Court in 2020, Lady Elish Angiolini recalled that in her practising days she once asked Robert Reed to write a paper on public interest immunity, which she suggested he take a few weeks to do. He appeared in her office with the completed paper the next day. He had, she said, produced a “masterpiece”. His erstwhile colleague on the bench, Lord Sumption, said that Lord Reed is “not a swaggerer” and that “he is not a bully”. “He doesn’t raise his voice. But he doesn’t need to because he’s highly respected as a thoughtful and highly intelligent judicial figure.”

The court sat in Glasgow’s City Chambers last week, following the previous regional sitting in Manchester in 2023 and before that Cardiff, Belfast and Edinburgh. Asked about the value of these regional sittings Lord Reed says that “a large part of the thinking behind setting up the Supreme Court was to bring the processes of the highest court in the country into the public gaze and make it more transparent – and we’re not going to achieve that by sitting all the time in London” and that he was keen to bring the court to Glasgow before he retired. The justices had a “very full programme of events” meeting with students, the public, community leaders. “I think the message came over that we’re a court that exists to serve all the people of the UK – the people of Scotland just as much as anywhere else.”

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