Джонатан Сампшн: Биография судьи и историка.

English lawyer and judge

Jonathan Philip Chadwick Sumption, Lord Sumption, , KC (born 9 December 1948), is a British author, medieval historian, former senior judge who sat on the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom between 2012 and 2018, and a current Non Permanent Judge of the Hong Kong Court of Final Appeal since 2019. Sumption was sworn in as a Justice of the Supreme Court on 11 January 2012, succeeding Lawrence Collins, Baron Collins of Mapesbury. Exceptionally, he was appointed to the Supreme Court directly from the practising bar, without having been a full time judge. He retired from the Supreme Court on 9 December 2018 upon reaching the mandatory retirement age of 70. Sumption is well known for his role as a barrister in many legal cases. They include appearances in the Hutton Inquiry on HM Government's behalf, in the Three Rivers case, his representation of former Cabinet Minister Stephen Byers and the Department for Transport in the Railtrack private shareholders' action against the British Government in 2005, for defending HM Government in an appeal hearing brought by Binyam Mohamed, and for successfully defending Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich in a private lawsuit brought by Boris Berezovsky. A former academic, Sumption was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2003 New Year Honours and is also known for writing a substantial narrative history of the Hundred Years' War in five volumes. Sumption has been elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society (FRHistS) and a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London (FSA). During the COVID 19 pandemic, Sumption criticised lockdowns and associated British government policies as economically harmful.

Jonathan Sumption was born on 9 December 1948. He is the eldest of the four children of Anthony Sumption, a decorated naval officer and barrister, and Hilda Hedigan; their marriage was dissolved in 1979. He was educated at Eton College, where at 15 he was at the bottom of his class. He read Medieval History at Magdalen College, Oxford, from 1967 to 1970, graduating with a first. He was elected a fellow of Magdalen College, teaching and writing books on medieval history from 1971 to 1975 before leaving to pursue a career in law. In 1974 Joseph and Margaret Thatcher together founded the Centre for Policy Studies to act as a think tank for the Conservative Party, and Sumption became one of its earliest employees, working as a speechwriter for Joseph. Sumption and Joseph co wrote a 1979 book, Equality, seeking to show that "no convincing arguments for an equal society have ever been advanced" and that "no such society has ever been successfully created". and the Guernsey Court of Appeal. In 2005, Sumption became joint head of Brick Court Chambers. He was a member of the Judicial Appointments Commission until his appointment to the Supreme Court. On 30 November 2007, when a practising barrister, Sumption successfully represented himself before Mr Justice Collins in a judicial review application in the Administrative Court concerning proposed development near his home at Greenwich.

The Guardian once described him as being a member of the "million a year club", the elite group of barristers earning over a million pounds a year.

On 4 May 2011 Sumption's appointment as a Justice of the Supreme Court was announced. Upon his subsequent swearing in on 11 January 2012,

Sumption was sworn of the Privy Council on 14 December 2011 in advance of his joining the Court, whose Justices also serve as members of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. He retired from the Supreme Court on 9 December 2018. Sumption is the first lawyer appointed to the Supreme Court without previously serving as a full time judge since its inception in 2009. There were only five such appointments as Law Lords to the Court's predecessor, the Appellate Committee of the House of Lords. Two were Scots lawyers: Lord Macmillan in 1930 and Lord Reid in 1948; the others were: Lord Macnaghten (1887), Lord Carson (1921) and Lord Radcliffe (1949). After his retirement, Sumption sat on the Supplementary Panel of the Supreme Court from 13 December 2018 to 30 January 2021. He voluntarily retired in 2021 because he considered it inappropriate to serve on the panel in view of his public criticisms of the government. On 13 December 2019, Sumption was appointed as a Non Permanent Judge of the Court of Final Appeal in Hong Kong by Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam. After making his pledge of allegiance to the Hong Kong SAR of the People's Republic of China as part of the judicial oath, Lord Sumption officially commenced his office as a Hong Kong judge on 18 December 2019. He had previously appeared as counsel in the Court of Final Appeal in a number of cases.

Sumption's narrative history of the Hundred Years' War between England and France (of which five volumes have been published, between 1990 and 2023) has been widely praised as "earning a place alongside Steven Runciman's A History of the Crusades" according to Frederic Raphael, and as a work that "deploys an enormous variety of documentary material and interprets it with imaginative and intelligent sympathy" and is "elegantly written" (Rosamond McKitterick, Evening Standard); for Allan Massie it is "An enterprise on a truly Victorian scale What is most impressive about this work, apart from the author's mastery of his material and his deployment of it, is his political intelligence". Volume I (covering the years from the funeral of Charles IV of France in 1329 to the Surrender of Calais in 1347) was first published in 1990. Volume II (covering the years from 1347 to 1369) was published in 1999. Volume III (covering the years from 1369 to 1399) appeared in 2009. Volume IV (covering the years from 1399 to 1422) appeared in 2015, the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Agincourt. Volume V (covering the years from 1422 to 1453) was published in 2023. Sumption has been praised for a clipped and polished prose style, which he credits to his unwillingness to employ cliché. He admires Edward Gibbon but points out that "if anybody wrote like him today they'd be dismissed as a pompous fart".

Sumption has been described as a "conservative neo liberal and libertarian." In 1974, he worked with Conservative MP Sir Keith Joseph at the Centre for Policy Studies, an economically liberal think tank. However, he was a Labour supporter at the time and later voted for Tony Blair. He has said that an attempt to rapidly achieve gender equality in the Supreme Court through quotas or positive discrimination could end up discouraging the best applicants, as they would no longer believe that the process would select on merit, and "have appalling consequences for justice". He has criticised the judicial appointments process in the United States, where politicians quiz judicial appointees on their views, as "discreditable" and described former Attorney General for England and Wales Sir Geoffrey Cox's proposal for a similar system as, "one of the most ill thought out ideas ever to emerge from a resentful government frustrated by its inability to do whatever it likes". He has criticised the historical curriculum in English schools as "appallingly narrow", warning that by forcing English schoolchildren to study 1918–1945 in isolation they "are being taught about Germany and Europe during its most aberrant period".

He voted to remain in the European Union in the 2016 referendum, describing the decision to leave as, "a serious mistake that will do lasting damage to our economy" and that, "Britain will be dominated by the European Union whether we belong to it or not". Nevertheless, he believed there were strong arguments for Brexit on the grounds of national sovereignty and identity. He said that leavers, "were not mad. They are not irrational, not naive and have not been deceived". He wrote that, "All of these patronising explanations of their decision seems to me to be mere attempts to evade unpalatable truths."

Sumption has written in detail about his concerns regarding the relationship between the judiciary and politics in several lectures and books, most notably his books Trials of the State: Law and the Decline of Politics (2019) and Law in a Time of Crisis (2021). He argues that since the 1960s, but particularly in recent years, the courts have undermined the political processes and institutions of parliament by judging issues that should be decided by elected politicians and ministers. He specifically critiques the expansion of judicial review, saying that, "It has tended to intrude into areas that belong to parliament and ministers answerable to parliament", and has criticised the interpretative powers conferred by the Human Rights Act 1998. He argues that political figures are more democratically accountable to the public for decisions they make, unlike judges who are unelected and difficult to remove from office. He has criticised the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), which interprets and adjudicates on the European Convention on Human Rights. He has compared the values of the ECHR and those of the post war dictatorships of eastern Europe, stating that "they both employ the concept of democracy as a generalised term of approval for a set of political values". He describes the text of the convention as "wholly admirable" but argues that the Strasbourg court has interpreted and developed the rights very broadly to go beyond their original meaning and to the extent that the rights cover issues which are properly the remit of elected legislatures. He has criticised the "living instrument" doctrine, particularly regarding Article 8 of the convention, which he describes as, "the most striking example of this kind of mission creep." He has said that if there was no significant change in the approach of the Strasburg court then he would support withdrawing from the convention.

Sumption has been highly critical of the British government's lockdowns during the COVID 19 pandemic on civil libertarian grounds, seeing them as a slippery slope, He has also questioned whether the virus is serious enough to justify restrictive measures, while also arguing that the effects of lockdowns may be worse than the effects of the actual virus, attracting controversy and debate in British media outlets. Health experts have criticised his views, stating that the concept of "quality adjusted life years" is primarily useful for debates on the allocation of scarce healthcare resources, and may not be useful for discussion of a nationwide lockdown. In July 2021, Full Fact concluded in a fact checking article that Sumption had "made several mistakes with Covid 19 data when talking about the disease" on BBC Radio 4's Today programme. This included incorrect statements that many recorded COVID 19 deaths were people who had the virus but had died of unrelated causes, that people who had died of COVID 19 "would probably have died within a year after" (on average, British COVID 19 victims lost around a decade of life), and that only "hundreds" of people without pre existing medical conditions in the UK had died of COVID 19 (the true figure, up to the end of March 2021, was 15,883 in England and Wales alone). Professor of Health and Law John Coggon critiqued Sumption's philosophical and legal arguments against COVID 19 restrictions in the Journal of Medical Ethics; he also contrasted Sumption's libertarian arguments against such restrictions with arguments he himself had made against the right to die when giving his judgment in R (Nicklinson) v Ministry of Justice, when he argued that the moral principle of sanctity of life should be protected in law.

Sumption married Teresa Whelan and they have two daughters, one son, and five grandchildren. He lives in Greenwich and has a second home, a chateau in the village of Berbiguières in the south of France.