Law Pod UK new episode: Baroness Hale on Privacy and Press Freedom, the Children Act and Women in the Legal Profession
20 January 2025
In Episode 211 of Law Pod UK I am joined by former President of the Supreme Court, Brenda Hale, first female law lord in the Court of Appeal, one time Professor of Law at Manchester University and participant in many Law Commission projects during her nine year sojourn there. She discusses with me the emergence of the English law of privacy from the network of common law torts such as breach of confidence, misuse of private information and libel, in the constellation of cases that reached the courts before the 1998 Human Rights Act ushered in the right to respect to private life and the right to freedom of expression under the European Convention on Human Rights and Freedoms. The balancing act between Article 8 and 10 is not always straightforward, as Lady Hale points out, where different members of the appellate committee have differing views on transparency and confidentiality.
She talks about her years at the Law Commission and her role in the team collaborating with what was then the Department of Health and Social Security to come up with a systematic drawing together of all the different rules about the care and upbringing of children the Children Act 1989. At this point of the discussion, Rosalind and Lady Hale touch upon the novel by Ian McEwan by that very title, The Children Act (2014), which gets Lady Hale’s full endorsement.
The full citations of the cases we discuss are set out below.
Kaye v Robertson [1991] FSR 62
Campbell v Mirror Group Newspapers Ltd [2004] UKHL 22
Patel v Mirza [2016] UKSC 42 (general principles of illegality)
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