Tributes have poured in to Sir James Munby, the former president of the Family Division who is said to have ‘saved many lives’. He died suddenly on new year’s day, aged 77.
Munby retired as president of the Family Division of the High Court in 2018 after five years in office when he reached the statutory retirement age of 70. He went on to serve as chairman of the board of the Nuffield Family Justice Observatory from 2018 to 2023, and remained actively involved in family law matters until his death.
As the country’s most senior family law judge, Munby often spoke out against injustice and failures of the state that left children and young people at risk.
In Re X (A Child) (No 3) [2017] EWHC 2036 (Fam), where a young woman who had made numerous attempts to kill herself was due to be released from youth detention 11 days short of her eighteenth birthday, he called out the ‘disgraceful and utterly shaming’ lack of proper provision of the clinical, residential and other support services needed to protect vulnerable young people.
Munby said: ‘If, when in eleven days’ time she is released .. [and] we, the system, society, the state, are unable to provide X with the supportive and safe placement she so desperately needs, and if, in consequence, she is enabled to make another attempt on her life, then I can only say, with bleak emphasis: we will have blood on our hands.’
In another case, he went against the wishes of the medical team in the case of AB, a four-year-old child with severe neurological issues, ruling that she should be allowed to live.
Cyrus Larizadeh KC, a former chairman of the Family Law Bar Association who acted in the case, recalled the girl’s parents asking him to write to Munby seven years after he gave the judgment to thank him. They sent a picture of their daughter, then 11, with her younger brother.
Munby replied stating that the letter was ‘a chastening reminder of the fallibility of medical science’ and a ‘remarkable testament to parental devotion’.
Larizadeh told the Gazette: ‘He saved many such lives, protected many children and reunited many families. AB continues to enjoy family life thanks to Sir James.’ He added: ‘Sir James passing is seismic. He leaves a huge legacy.’
Bar chair Kirsty Brimelow KC said: ‘Sir James Munby’s judicial career was distinguished and marked by moral clarity and compassion for the vulnerable. His judgments often were likened to writings of Charles Dickens as he railed against and sought to remedy social injustice. And he did just that, one case at a time.’
Lorraine Cavanagh KC, co-chair of the Association of Lawyers for Children, said 'Sir James’ jurisprudence is the weave of the fabric of modern-day family law’, praising his ‘encyclopaedic knowledge of domestic and international law that was only matched by his kindness to and understanding of the families who came before him’.
She added: ‘Where Sir James saw unfairness or failings within the systems around children and vulnerable adults, he would call it out, often in painfully honest and uncompromising terms. The vast catalogue of precedents- and rights-based jurisprudence from Sir James Munby will serve children and vulnerable adults as well in the future, as they have to date.’
More personally, family law barrister and friend, Professor Jo Delahunty KC branded him as a ‘titan within the legal world’ who is ‘irreplaceable’ and who had ‘so much more to say and do’. She recalled the ‘man of principle; prepared to speak up and out about things that mattered. He was a thinker, an agitator, a writer, a doer. He had an endless fount of knowledge and opinion which he shared with generous enthusiasm.’ When she last spoke to him, a week before his death, she told the Gazette: ‘He was characteristically full of beans and ideas and plans.’ He signed off his last email to her after they put down the phone: ‘Although now 77 - tempus fugit - I refuse to see myself as one of the old men, many of whom, of course, are very much younger!’
Born in 1948, Munby attended Magdalen College School and studied at Wadham College, Oxford, where he was an honorary fellow. He was called to the bar by Middle Temple in 1971, practised at New Square Chambers and was appointed Queen’s Counsel in 1988.
Appointed to the High Court in 2000, he was assigned to the family division and also authorised to sit in the Administrative Court. In 2009 he became chairman of the Law Commission and was made a Lord Justice of Appeal in the same year. In 2013 he succeeded Sir Nicholas Wall as president of the Family Division.
In 1977 Munby married Jennifer, who survives him along with their son and daughter.
- In a note sent to judges today, Munby's successor as president of the Family Division, Sir Andrew McFarlane, said: 'James was a very substantial individual in the family law world for over three decades. His presence still resonates on a daily basis as we rely upon his many judgments. As president he was exactly the right man, in the right job and at the right time. James cared greatly for the wellbeing of the system and for each of us within it.'
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