Looking to the future

We speak to the former President of the Supreme Court, the Right Honourable Lord David Neuberger of Abbotsbury, about his recent patronage of the Aberdeen Law Project and the future of law.

For Lord David Neuberger, the invitation to become a patron of the Aberdeen Law Project had an unusually personal element.

“Longer ago than I care to think, probably getting on for 60 years, my father [the highly distinguished professor of chemical pathology, Albert Neuberger], was given an honorary degree from Aberdeen. My mother was unwell at the time, so I went up with him. So I have happy memories of the university in Aberdeen,” Lord Neuberger says.

But even beyond his particular connection to Aberdeen, in terms of public interest, Lord Neuberger believes law projects in general are increasingly important enterprises.

“It is very good experience for students who are studying law as an academic subject to also discover at an early stage what law means in practical terms, and there is nothing better than going and advising people with problems. Secondly, it enables people with problems to get access to legal advice, where the level of legal aid and the availability of legal advice is not what it should be for people of limited means. Thirdly, these projects enable students to mix with people they wouldn’t otherwise meet and get advice from them,” he says.

“Personally – particularly when I was a judge but even now – I spend a lot of time with old people and it’s nice to spend time with young people. I have children and grandchildren, but it’s also good to visit universities and see students.”

Unexpected route

Lord Neuberger’s enthusiasm for younger generations of law students and the potential they bring is evident, even if their route into law is quite different from his own. Despite a career that saw him rise to become Master of the Rolls and President of the Supreme Court, law was one of the last things on the young David Neuberger’s mind.

“Looking back, I was naturally a lawyer and I should have been a lawyer, but I was very influenced by my mother who didn’t approve of lawyers so I never thought of law as a career until I was 25. Strangely enough, I think my mother trained me to be a lawyer without intending to because I was an argumentative boy. I would argue with her and she would get fed up and often say, ‘OK, I’ve had enough of this, let’s change sides and you argue the other side now’. That was quite good training for law, although it wasn’t meant to be,” Lord Neuberger says.

After reading chemistry at Oxford and then spending three years as a merchant banker at Rothschild & Sons – “I quickly discovered that if I was a bad scientist, I was a worse banker” – Lord Neuberger self-funded his studies to become a barrister and was called to the Bar at Lincoln’s Inn in 1974. He became a Queen’s Counsel in 1987, a High Court Judge in 1996, and became the youngest sitting Law Lord in 2007.

Now retired as a judge, Lord Neuberger continues to work full-time in arbitration, mediation and advisory work, aided by what the Legal 500 called his “intellect and charm [and] complete absence of pomp”. Even with his extraordinary level of legal experience, this humility and forward thinking – which should prove to be equally beneficial in his dealings with Aberdeen’s students – is clear in the way he addresses the subject of legal change. For example, while he is a fierce defender of the rule of law, he appreciates there are other issues to consider.

“Is law getting into things too much? Are we concerned too much about rights and is that bringing law into disrepute? It’s a difficult one to judge because standards and morals change and if, as I am, you are in your mid-70s, you are not necessarily in touch or sympathetic to all modern trends. So if I feel that the law is intruding too much or human rights are getting a bit excessive in certain areas, that may just be a comment on me being old, not on anything else,” he says.

“I think you have to accept that there is a degree of things moving on. If you don’t like a new moral standard, it’s very tempting to say that it is inimical to the rule of law or inimical to public morals, or whatever, and all you’re really feeling is that you don’t like it because it’s not what you’re used to. You have to be very careful about saying something is wrong in principle simply because you don’t like it.

“It’s like a judge who may not like one party and therefore finds against that party, even though the law is actually on that party’s side. Being human, you can’t put aside your emotions altogether but you have to be very careful that you are not being guided by your emotions rather than guided by the right principles.”

Machine learning

As a close friend of Richard Susskind, who until recently was IT advisor to the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Neuberger believes that one way to address the issue of a judge’s particular state of mind is the use of technology.

“Whether it’s AI or some other form of computerised system, I think it would be useful in due course to have a system that a judge can use to plug in the various features of a case and get an idea of what the sentence should be. He or she might not be very happy with the results it provides, but at least it will give some sort of baseline approach and would make the judge think: ‘why am I departing from that?’” he says.

“I think an entirely computer-based approach is very dangerous, though. I think the human element has its problems – for example, if something in a judge’s personal life affects their emotions which then influences their decisions – but on the other hand it does allow you to adjust your response in an emotional way that is appropriate. So I quite like the idea, when machines are really up to it, to use machines as a guide, as a check.”

While keen not to be seen as trespassing on Scottish domestic law, the proposed development of juryless trials is also an area that Lord Neuberger believes requires nuanced thought.

“I have been very much a civil lawyer during my career and therefore I am slightly hesitant about pontificating about jury trials. To my mind at least, the great attraction of jury trials is that they involve members of the public in the court system. If you don’t have lay magistrates, as in England, and you don’t have juries, the whole court system becomes a sort of Freemasonry. So I think it is very valuable that members of the public are involved. Also, in some areas, guilty or not guilty decided by juries has an extra validity,” he says.

“Against that, juries mean that things take much longer, and I don’t know whether jury decisions are much more reliable that judge’s decisions. I don’t know whether they are less reliable either.

“So I am not actually particularly enamoured of juries, but I do think it is important to involve the public in the system. Also, having got juries, it’s quite a big step to start removing them. But, to be fair, both in England and Scotland the great majority of criminal cases are not decided by juries; it’s only the more important ones.”

Should they wish too, it’s an issue that Aberdeen’s students can discuss with him at the Aberdeen Law Project’s Annual Lecture in March.

“I am there to do whatever they would like me to do… if anybody wants in-depth discussion about certain issues, they can raise a question,” Lord Neuberger says.

With such a luminary in law at their service, it’s an offer any young law student would be remiss to ignore.