“My Lord” or “My Lady”? The Correct Mode of Addressing Female Judges

My view is straightforward: a female Judge should be addressed as My Lady or Your Ladyship, and a male Judge as My Lord or Your Lordship. That is not a concession to fashion. It is correct usage, good English, and the solution long ago adopted by the English, custodians of the tradition we inherited.

1. Where Did “We Are All Gentlemen at the Bar” Come From?

The contrary school rests on the old saying that there are no ladies at the Bar, that we are all gentlemen; it is, in all likelihood, the true basis on which some female Judges insist on being addressed as My Lord. Trace it to its root and it collapses.

The root is simple. For some six centuries the English Bar was, by law and not mere habit, an exclusively male institution. The exclusion rested on a medieval treatise, The Mirror of Justices, adopted by Coke and enshrined by Blackstone, which declared that “the law will not suffer women to be attorneys, nor infants nor serfs.” Little more than a century ago, in Bebb v Law Society [1914] 1 Ch 286, the English Court of Appeal held that a woman was not a “person” within the meaning of section 2 of the Solicitors Act 1843 and so could not be admitted to the profession, although section 48 of the same Act provided that the masculine included the feminine. In such a world, “Gentlemen” was not courtesy but fact. That is the saying’s entire pedigree: it described a legal reality, never an eternal rule.

That reality died more than a century ago. The Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act 1919 received royal assent on 23 December 1919, providing that no person shall be disqualified by sex or marriage from any civil profession. The very next day, Christmas Eve 1919, Helena Normanton was admitted to the Middle Temple, the first woman in any Inn of Court. Dr Ivy Williams became the first woman called to the English Bar on 10 May 1922, at Inner Temple, and Normanton, called that November, became the first to practise. Nigeria’s first female lawyer, Stella Jane Thomas, followed in 1935; today women form a substantial share of every new call at our Law School.

From that day to this, the saying has been a fiction. A fiction may be harmless at a Bar dinner, where the toast survives as a fossil of etiquette; it becomes wrong English, and a contradiction in terms, when pressed into service in court to insist that a lady is a gentleman and My Lady must answer to My Lord. Even its defenders cannot locate its origin: searchers report that none exists; it survives on repetition, not authority. And England, whose all male Bar gave birth to the phrase, has abandoned it comprehensively: lady barristers are not addressed as gentlemen, and the English Bench itself now runs from Mrs Justice and Ms Justice through Lady Justice to the Lady Chief Justice. Whatever the history, it is archaic and does not stand the test of reality, for there are now both men and women at the Bar; a tradition whose factual foundation perished in 1919 cannot dictate our grammar today.

2. The English Practice Is Gendered, and Always Has Been

Female High Court Judges in England are addressed as My Lady, a settled usage recorded in the English courts’ practice directions. A male High Court Judge is styled The Honourable Mr Justice; a female High Court Judge is styled The Honourable Mrs Justice or, where she herself so elects, Ms Justice; indeed the official guidance published by the Judiciary of England and Wales at judiciary.uk gives the styles as Mr, Mrs or Ms Justice. The office is one; the style is inflected to the holder, down to her own choice of honorific. That is the tradition properly understood.

3. The Butler-Sloss Lesson

The point was settled after 1988, when Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss became the first woman appointed to the English Court of Appeal. The governing statute, section 2(3) of the Supreme Court Act 1981 (now the Senior Courts Act 1981), knew only the title Lord Justice of Appeal, so counsel were driven to the contortion “My Lady, Lord Justice Butler-Sloss.” In 1994 the Master of the Rolls, Sir Thomas Bingham, issued a Practice Note, Mode of Address: Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss [1994] EW Misc 1, describing that usage as plainly absurd and directing that she be referred to as My Lady, Lady Justice Butler-Sloss; Parliament later amended the statute by the Courts Act 2003 to make Lady Justice the formal title. Mark the direction of travel: the English did not force the woman into the masculine title in the name of the unity of the office; they reformed the title to fit the holder. The principle has now reached the summit. When Northern Ireland appointed the first woman to head its judiciary in 2021, Dame Siobhan Keegan was sworn in as the Lady Chief Justice; when England and Wales followed in 2023, appointing the first woman in nearly eight hundred years, Dame Sue Carr took her oath as the Lady Chief Justice, the statute’s masculine description notwithstanding. The dignity of the office lost nothing; the dignity of the person gained everything.

4. Our Own History Points the Same Way

My generation will recall that until the mid 1970s, Nigerian Judges were styled The Honourable Mr Justice. My own father, appointed a Judge of the High Court of the Mid-Western State in 1967, was styled The Honourable Mr Justice Atake until he retired, and in his day the style carried a weight the present generation may not appreciate: there was then no Court of Appeal in Nigeria, save for the short lived Western Nigeria Court of Appeal in the old Western State. The Court of Appeal was established only in 1976, by the Federal Court of Appeal Act, No. 43 of 1976; before then, as the Court’s own official history records, appeals lay directly from the High Court to the Supreme Court, our final court from 1963 upon the abolition of appeals to the Privy Council. A High Court Judge of that era therefore stood but one step below the apex of the judicature, and the style matched the station.

Why did The Honourable Mr Justice give way to today’s neutral The Honourable Justice? No official instrument records the reason, but the timing tells its own story. The style changed within a few years of the elevation of our first female Judge, Hon. Justice Modupe Omo-Eboh, in 1969, and by about 1980 five women already sat on our Bench: Hon. Justice Modupe Omo-Eboh herself, our first; Hon. Justice Dulcie Oguntoye, our second, elevated to the Lagos State Bench in February 1976; and Justices Roseline Omotosho, Atinuke Ige and Aloma Mukhtar, the last of whom, elevated to the Kano State Bench in 1977, would rise to become our first female Chief Justice of Nigeria. The irresistible inference is that the masculine style was retired precisely because women had joined the Bench, and that rather than adopt the English Mrs Justice, we chose neutrality. When the composition of the Bench changed, our language changed with it; the mode of address should do the same.

5. The Pioneers Deserve Accuracy

Since the history is often told inaccurately, permit two precisions of record. The first woman to sit as a full time professional Judge in England was Sybil Campbell, appointed a stipendiary magistrate at Tower Bridge in 1945; the first woman on the English High Court Bench was Dame Elizabeth Lane, in 1965. Our own first, Hon. Justice Modupe Omo-Eboh, called to the Bar at Lincoln’s Inn in 1953, was elevated to the High Court Bench at Benin City on 13 November 1969, in the old Mid-Western State judiciary. Of that I can speak with personal knowledge: she was our next door neighbour in those years. It is no service to these pioneers to address their successors by a masculine style their careers were spent transcending.

6. My Experience at the Bar

In the Lagos judiciary, female Judges accept, and understand, My Lady and Your Ladyship. Outside Lagos, many female Judges not only decline the style but receive it with something approaching hostility, as though it diminished them. One experience illustrates it. A female Justice once informed me that the Chief Justice of Nigeria at the time had directed that, for recognition and in the interest of gender equality, all Judges, male and female alike, must be addressed as My Lord and Your Lordship, and that I should not address her as My Lady or Your Ladyship. I did not argue; it was her court, and I complied. But, I confess that I felt I was speaking wrong English, and the words sat so heavily in my mouth, My Lord, addressed to a lady plainly presiding before me, that wherever the occasion allowed I took refuge in “this Honourable Court,” which offended neither her Ladyship’s direction nor the English language. With the greatest respect, that directive makes my case: it sought equality by making the masculine style universal, when true equality lies in giving each holder of the office the style that fits her. My Lady is not a lesser form of My Lord; it is its exact equal, differing only as the person differs. To insist that a woman must be called My Lord is to say that the judicial office can only be imagined in male form. That, and not My Lady, is the truly diminishing position.

Conclusion

Address the office through the person: My Lord and Your Lordship for a male Judge, My Lady and Your Ladyship for a female Judge. It is correct, courteous and good English, which is exactly why the British adopted it. The saying that we are all gentlemen at the Bar belongs to a world the law itself buried in 1919, by the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act. Until practice settles uniformly across our jurisdictions, prudence at the Bar remains what it has always been: when in doubt, follow the preference of the Judge before you, for respect for the Bench is the one rule that admits of no exception.

Eyimofe Atake, SAN, PhD (Cantab)