Jonathan Sumption, Lord Sumption

Early life and education

His parents were Anthony Sumption, a decorated Royal Naval officer and barrister, and Hilda Hedigan; their marriage was dissolved in 1979.

Sumption was educated at Eton College and Magdalen College, Oxford. He graduated from Oxford University in 1970, receiving a BA degree in History with first class honours. He became a fellow of Magdalen College teaching and writing books on medieval history, before leaving to pursue a career in the Law. He was called to the bar at Inner Temple in 1975 and subsequently pursued a successful legal practice in commercial law. In the late 1970s Sumption was a regular contributor to The Sunday Telegraph.

Legal career

Sumption was appointed Queen's Counsel (QC) in 1986 at the relatively young age of 38, and 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 joint head of Brick Court Chambers.

On 30 November 2007, when a practising 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.

Supreme Court

On 4 May 2011 it was announced that Sumption would take a seat on the Supreme Court at a later date. Upon his subsequent swearing-in on 11 January 2012, he was granted, by Royal Sign Manual, the courtesy title of Lord Sumption. Sumption had been appointed to the Privy Council on 14 December 2011 in anticipation of his joining the Court, whose Justices double as members of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council.

Sumption is the first person appointed to the Supreme Court without previously serving as a full-time judge since its inception in 2009. There were only five such appointments 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).

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 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.

The Hundred Years War

Sumption's narrative history of The Hundred Years War between England and France (of which four volumes have so far been published, between 1990 and 2015) has been widely praised as "earning a place alongside Sir 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".

Five volumes are planned altogether. 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.

Sumption has been praised for a clipped and polished prose style, which he credits to his unwillingness to employ cliché. He admires Gibbon but points out "if anybody wrote like him today they’d be dismissed as a pompous fart".

Political views

Sumption said that an attempt to rapidly achieve gender equality in the Supreme Court through quotas or positive discrimination could end up discouraging male applicants and so "have appalling consequences for Justice". He has criticised the historical curriculum in English schools as "appallingly narrow", warning that by forcing English schoolchildren to study 1918-45 in isolation they "are being taught about Germany and Europe during its most aberrant period".

Pastimes

Sumption speaks French and Italian fluently, and reads Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, Catalan and Latin. He has said that 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 is a Director of the English National Opera and on the governing body of the Royal Academy of Music.

Full style

Publications

Articles

Lectures

As counsel

As judge