Male judges sitting in the Court of Appeal show more confidence than women in applying for Supreme Court roles ‘even if they do not necessary fulfil all the criteria’, the Supreme Court's president has told peers. 

Lord Reed and deputy president Lord Sales gave evidence this week to the Lords Constitution Committee on topics including recruitment, diversity, AI and public understanding of the court.

Speaking on diversity, Lord Reed said: ‘I think there is a big role here for leadership judges. My own experience has been that male judges in the Court of Appeal seem to be more confident about applying even if they do not necessary fulfil all the criteria that one is asking for. I have tried to address this in a number of ways,' he continued. 'One…has been inviting women to come and sit in our court. This is quite a regular thing, getting them to come and sit with us and asking them to then write the judgment and discover that they can do it, and that actually we’re quite a nice bunch of people to work with and I would hope that would encourage them.'

Lord Reed acknowledged ‘a lot of progress’ had been made, with women making up 40% of the judiciary. 'It does diminish at the upper levels, but I do think that is a function of time more than anything else. There are a lot of very able younger women in the system progressing through it, provided they stick at it and don’t decide they have more important things to do in their lives when they are in their sixties perhaps,’ he said.

The committee heard that ‘the proportion of judges from ethnic minorities is very similar to the proportion in the working population at large if you’re looking at people aged about 50-plus’ but the figure ‘conceals a problem’ that there are ‘very few Black judges’.

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On public perceptions, Lord Reed said: ‘So much criticism of our decisions seems to be based on an assumption that we simply give effect to our personal opinions.’

When the Supreme Court ‘decide a case, we spend a lot of time doing research to try and find out what the law is’, he said, adding: ‘It is not a question of asking your gut “what do I think about this issue”.’

Speaking on the use of artificial intelligence, Lord Sales said, while the technology had the potential for a ‘huge gain’ in access to justice, the downside was the increase in cases. ‘It’s happening already, the courts lower down the system are beginning to see something of a tidal wave of claims being brought precisely because it has been made much easier for people to mount claims and bring them in court. I think there is going to be a role of AI in managing, both in prompting access to justice but then in having to assist in managing the increased flow of business that comes in.’

Looking ahead, Lord Sales highlighted a concern on the future of the legal system and judiciary. He said: ‘Lawyers generally are going to have to be very careful not to become deskilled through using these tools. They are very seductive, very powerful tools and they can appear to do a lawyer’s job at the press of a button within minutes which might take days or even weeks for an individual to do.

‘There is a strong temptation for people now starting to use these systems to come to rely on them a little bit too much. If one thinks for what that might involve for the legal system. If we have a generation of people coming through who have not been applying their own minds, their own critical faculties to the outputs of these systems but simply taking them as read, we will face a problem with recruiting the senior judges of the future who have been trained in developing those critical faculties which is the whole point of having senior judges in the first place.’