The new High Court judges: 90% male, 100% white

The Judicial Advisory Commission (JAC) has appointed ten new High Court judges. All ten are white and only one of them is a woman, setting back efforts to rebalance a judiciary in which 63% of judges in the High Court and above are white men.

These appointments come while the legal system is systematically failing to deliver justice for women who are the victims of male violence.

The JAC was set up in 2006, taking over powers from the Lord Chancellor to appoint new judges. Part of its role, as laid out in the Constitutional Reform Act 2005, is to “encourage diversity in the range of persons available for selection for appointments.” 

The appointments for 2026 are even worse than those in 2025, when four out of eleven new High Court judges were women.

These biases have real world consequences. A 2022 University of Manchester study agreed that 95% of lawyers and judges said that “racial bias plays some role in the processes and/or outcomes of the justice system”, and 56% said that they had seen “one or more judges acting in a racially biased way towards a defendant”. 

Official statistics also show that, on average, Black and Asian people receive longer custodial sentences than white people. And studies show that this still happens when people are charged with the same crime, and have the same criminal history and personal circumstances. 

This is the first round of appointments since Lynne Berry CBE took over as chair, promising to find the “best people” for these “important roles” by “looking as widely as possible for talented candidates and encouraging outstanding individuals from every background”.

Berry’s professional biography describes her as “encouraging women’s leadership and professional experiences to be valued in all sectors”. The equality charity The Wollstonescraft Society describes her as a patron, and says that she has been a government advisor on equality and women’s rights.

For Good Law Project’s executive director, Jo Maugham, the latest round of appointments are “a slap in the face for those of us crying out for a judiciary that understands the lived realities for women and Black and Brown people in Britain today”. 

“This isn’t about the individuals,” Maugham said, “some thoughtful and conscientious people have been appointed, but about a system that yearns for conformity and delivers injustice.”