Patrons
Lord Briggs of Westbourne
Lord Briggs of Westbourne is a Justice of the Supreme Court. He focussed on the needs of litigants in person in the Chancery Modernisation Review which he conducted in 2013. He highlighted the importance of public legal education in his Civil Courts Structure review in 2015 and 2016 . In that report he said that the level of success of the new online court in extending access to justice would depend critically upon parallel progress being made with public legal education generally, and recognised the need for affordable legal advice on the merits of any case.
Lord Briggs was appointed as a Lord Justice of Appeal in 2013 and as a Justice of the Supreme Court in 2017.He was Deputy Head of Civil Justice from January 2016 until his appointment to the Supreme Court.
Professor Dame Hazel Genn DBE KC
Professor Dame Hazel Genn is a leading authority on civil justice whose work has had a major influence on policy-makers around the world. She is currently Dean of the Faculty of Laws, Professor of Socio-Legal Studies at University College London.
She has held full-time research posts at Oxford University Centre for Socio-Legal Studies and the Cambridge Institute of Criminology. She served on the Committee on Standards in Public Life and in 2009 was appointed to the Secretary of State's Advisory Panel on Judicial Diversity. In 2005, she was awarded the US Law and Society International Prize for distinguished scholarship and she holds Honorary Doctorates from the Universities of Keele, Edinburgh, Leicester, and Kingston.
Hazel was chair of the Public Legal Education and Support (PLEAS) task force and was chair of the Advisory Panel for research on Family Advice and Information for the Legal Services Commission.
She served for eight years as deputy chair and then chair of the Economic and Social Research Council's Research Grants Board and in 2008 she was elected Honorary Master of the Bench of Gray's Inn.
Hazel Genn is a leading authority on civil justice and has published widely in the field including Meeting Legal Needs? (1981), Understanding Civil Justice (1997) and Tribunals for Diverse Users (2006). She is author of companion volumes Paths to Justice: What People Do and Think About Going to Law (1999), and, with Alan Paterson, Paths to Justice Scotland: What Scottish People Do and Think About going to Law (2001), which report the findings of two major national surveys into public use of and attitudes to the legal system.
She was one of the team leading the Nuffield Foundation's Inquiry on Empirical Legal Research and is one of the authors of the final report Law in the Real World: Improving our Understanding of How Law Works, published in November 2006. In November/December 2008 she delivered the 2008 Hamlyn Lectures on civil justice.
The Rt Hon Lord Neuberger of Abbotsbury
The Rt. Hon. Lord Neuberger of Abbotsbury was appointed as Master of the Rolls in 2009 and then became President of the Supreme Court in October 2012.
He was called to the Bar in 1974 and was made a Queen’s Counsel (QC) in 1987. He became a Bencher for Lincolns Inn in 1993. His first judicial appointment was as a Recorder from 1990 until 1996 when he was appointed a High Court judge in the Chancery Division and was then the Supervisory Chancery Judge for the Midland, Wales and Chester and Western Circuits 2000 - 2004.
In January 2004 he was appointed a Lord Justice of Appeal and led an investigation for the Bar Council into widening access to the barrister profession. In 2007 he was made a Lord of Appeal in Ordinary and created a life peer as Baron Neuberger of Abbotsbury in the county of Dorset.
