Monarch Elizabeth II Name Nicholas Baron | Monarch Elizabeth II Preceded by Office created | |
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Deputy The Lord Hope of Craighead Deputy The Lord Hoffmann
The Lord Hope of Craighead Preceded by The Lord Bingham of Cornhill Role Lords of Appeal in Ordinary Succeeded by David Neuberger, Baron Neuberger of Abbotsbury Books The BSE Inquiry: Return to an Order of the Honourable the House of Commons Dated October 2000 for the Report, Evidence and Supporting Papers of the Inquiry Into the Emergence and Identification of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) and Variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (vCJD) and the Action Taken in Response to it Up to 20 March 1996 Education Bryanston School, King's College, Cambridge, University of Cambridge People also search for Randy J. Holland, John Vinney, Sue Sutherland | ||
Residence Hampstead, United Kingdom | ||
Nicholas Addison Phillips, Baron Phillips of Worth Matravers, (born 21 January 1938) is a British lawyer and former senior English judge.
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Lord Phillips served as the inaugural President of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom, holding office between October 2009 and October 2012. He is also the last Senior Law Lord and the first Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales to be head of the English judiciary when that function was transferred from the Lord Chancellor in April 2006. Before his chief justiceship, he was Master of the Rolls from 2000 to 2005. He sits as a crossbencher.
Early life
Phillips was educated at Bryanston School; appointed a Governor of the school in 1975, he has been Chairman of its Governors since 1981. He undertook his National Service with the Royal Navy and the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, being commissioned as an officer. After the two years' service he went to King's College, Cambridge, where he read law. In 1962, he was called to the Bar at the Middle Temple, where he was the Harmsworth Scholar. He undertook pupillage at 2 Essex Court Chambers (with the Anglo-American QC, Waldo Porges) and subsequently obtained a Tenancy there, later moving to 1 Brick Court (now Brick Court Chambers). In 1973 he was appointed as Junior Counsel to the Ministry of Defence and to the Treasury in Maritime and Admiralty matters. On 4 April 1978, he became a Queen's Counsel (QC). His maternal grandparents, two young immigrants to this country were Sephardic Jews and had eloped to Britain from Alexandria.
Judicial career
In 1982, Phillips was appointed a Recorder and from 1987 was a full-time High Court Judge on the Queen's Bench Division, with the customary knighthood. He took an interest in legal training, and was Chairman of the Council of Legal Education from 1992 to 1997. He presided over several complex fraud trials including those covering the Robert Maxwell pension fund fraud and Barlow Clowes. In 1995, he became a Lord Justice of Appeal and was appointed to the Privy Council.
On 12 January 1999, he was appointed a Lord of Appeal in Ordinary and created a Life Peer under the Appellate Jurisdiction Act 1876 as Baron Phillips of Worth Matravers, of Belsize Park in the London Borough of Camden. He then succeeded Lord Woolf as Master of the Rolls on 6 June 2000. He conducted an inquiry into the outbreak of bovine spongiform encephalopathy. He served as Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales from 2005 to 2008, when he was reappointed as a Law Lord. Since 2008, Phillips was the Senior Lord of Appeal in Ordinary until he became the first President of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom on 1 October 2009. Elizabeth II advanced him as a Knight Companion of the Order of the Garter on 23 April 2011.
On 11 October 2011, Phillips announced his retirement on 30 September 2012, almost four months before the mandatory retirement age for British judges at turning 75 on 21 January 2013.
After retiring from the bench, Phillips followed Lord Woolf as President of the Qatar International Court at Doha. He also acts as an arbitrator.
In March 2012, the Government of Hong Kong SAR appointed Lord Phillips as a Non-Permanent Judge of the Hong Kong Court of Final Appeal. He also serves as President of the British Maritime Law Association and Chairman of the European Maritime Law Organisation.
International legal distinction
Phillips was awarded the International Jurist Award at the International Conference of Jurists 2007; the award was presented by the President Smt. Pratibha Patil at Vigyan Bhawan, New Delhi.
Personal life
Phillips is married to Christylle Marie-Thérèse Rouffiac, with whom he has two daughters, and a stepson and stepdaughter, and lives in Hampstead, London. His daughter Marie is a novelist. He is a member of Brooks's and the Garrick Clubs. He is a Liveryman of the Worshipful Company of Drapers and a Past Prime Warden of the Worshipful Company of Shipwrights, as well as being an Honorary Fellow of the Society of Advanced Legal Studies, University College London, Hughes Hall, Cambridge, and of King's College, Cambridge.
Lord Phillips was also appointed the inaugural Distinguished Fellow and Visiting Professor of The Dickson Poon School of Law, King's College London. He has received honorary degrees of Doctor of Laws (Hon. LLD) from Exeter (1998), Birmingham (2003), London (2004), Wake Forest University (2010), and the International Institute of Maritime Law, and of Doctor of Civil Law (Hon. DCL) from City University, London (2003). He also currently serves as Chancellor of Bournemouth University.