Stephen Sedley

Family background

His father was Bill Sedley (1910–1985), of a Jewish immigrant family, who operated a legal advice service in the East End of London in the 1930s. In the War he served in North Africa and Italy with the Eighth Army. Bill Sedley founded the firm of lawyers of Seifert and Sedley in the 1940s with Sigmund Seifert and was a lifelong Communist.

Legal career

After graduation from Queens' College, Cambridge, Stephen Sedley was called to the Bar (Inner Temple) in 1964 and practised in Cloisters chambers with John Platts-Mills, David Turner-Samuels and Michael Mansfield.

Sedley had a particular interest in the development of administrative law (the judicial review of governmental and administrative decision making). He was involved in cases which broadened the scope of judicial review and established the modern procedure for judicial review, and in ground-breaking cases in relation to employment rights, sex and race discrimination, prisoners’ rights, coroners’ inquests, immigration and asylum and freedom of speech. He was counsel in many high-profile cases and inquiries, from the death of Blair Peach and the Carl Bridgewater murder appeal to the Helen Smith inquest and the contempt hearing against Kenneth Baker, then Home Secretary.

He became a QC in 1983. He was appointed a High Court judge in 1992, serving in the Queen's Bench Division. In 1999 he was appointed to the Court of Appeal as a Lord Justice of Appeal. He was a Judge ad hoc of the European Court of Human Rights and a Member ad hoc of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. His retirement from the Court of Appeal in 2011 coincided with the publication of a collection of his essays and lectures.

Notable judicial opinions

As a first instance judge, Sedley delivered important judgments in the field of administrative law, notably in relation to the concept of legitimate expectation as a ground for judicial review, and the duty to give reasons.

In the Court of Appeal he was one of the first English judges to recognise the right of privacy as an aspect of human autonomy and dignity, and was influential in developing the now well-established principle of proportionality (which he described as a "metwand" for balancing competing rights) in the fields of human rights and judicial review. His dissenting judgments in two appeals in 2008 concerning anti-terrorist measures were eventually to be vindicated on appeal to the House of Lords and in the first appeal to be heard by the Supreme Court in 2009. His judgment in the Chagos Islanders litigation developed the ambit of modern judicial review, and in a judgment in 2010 he developed his view that the basis for judicial review is to control abuse of power. He also made a number of judgments in the field of immigration and asylum law. Always interested in freedom of speech his judgments also made important contributions to the modernisation of libel law. His formulation of the real significance of freedom of expression in a case involving the unlawful arrest of a street preacher has been much quoted: "Free speech includes not only the inoffensive but the irritating, the contentious, the eccentric, the heretical, the unwelcome and the provocative provided it does not tend to provoke violence. Freedom only to speak inoffensively is not worth having."

"Sedley's Laws of Documents"

He formulated what has come to be known as "Sedley's Laws of Documents" after experiencing the tribulations of litigation:

1. First Law: Documents may be assembled in any order, provided it is not chronological, numerical or alphabetical.
2. Second Law: Documents shall in no circumstances be paginated continuously.
3. Third Law: No 2 copies of any bundle shall have the same pagination.
4. Fourth Law: Every document shall carry at least 3 numbers in different places.
5. Fifth Law: Any important documents shall be omitted.
6. Sixth Law: At least 10 per cent of the documents shall appear more than once in the bundle.
7. Seventh Law: As many photocopies as practicable shall be illegible, truncated or cropped.
8. Eighth Law: At least 80 per cent of the documents shall be irrelevant. Counsel shall refer in Court to no more than 10 per cent of the documents, but these may include as many irrelevant ones as counsel or solicitor deems appropriate.
9. Ninth Law: Only one side of any double-sided document shall be reproduced.
10. Tenth Law: Transcriptions of manuscript documents shall bear as little relation as reasonably practicable to the original.
11. Eleventh Law: Documents shall be held together, in the absolute discretion of the solicitor assembling them, by: a steel pin sharp enough to injure the reader; a staple too short to penetrate the full thickness of the bundle; tape binding so stitched that the bundle cannot be fully opened; or a ring or arch-binder, so damaged that the 2 arches do not meet.

Important articles

Sedley has provoked considerable debate about the role of government in collecting and keeping DNA samples. At present criminal suspects detained by the police in the UK are automatically given cheek swabs and their DNA kept, in perpetuity, by the government. This has created the situation where different races are differently represented in the United Kingdom National DNA Database. On the grounds that this situation is indefensible, Lord Justice Sedley discussed the case for a blanket DNA collection policy, including collecting samples from all visitors to the UK.

Ian McEwan said of Ashes and Sparks: Essays On Law and Justice (Cambridge University Press, 2011) "you could have no interest in the law and read his book for pure intellectual delight, for the exquisite, finely balanced prose, the prickly humor, the knack of artful quotation and an astonishing historical grasp".

In February 2012, the London Review of Books published an essay by Sedley in which he criticized soon-to-be Supreme Court Justice Jonathan Sumption’s FA Mann lecture in which Sumption had argued that the judiciary had overstepped the boundary between its legitimate judicial function and illegitimate political decision making in the context of the remedy of judicial review. The critique centred on Sedley's conceptions of the precise interplay of the judicial, legislative, and executive branches, and made reference to the grey areas within which Parliament had not expressed any set opinion.

Notable appointments and offices

Published works

Cases