”My Lady” Remains Correct: A Reply to Mr Sylvester Udemezue

Right of Reply

Dr Eyimofe Atake, SAN, recently concluded in these pages that a female Judge is properly addressed as “My Lady” or “Your Ladyship”. In a Rejoinder, Mr Sylvester Udemezue refuted this position. Dr Atake’s Reply addresses each of the ten headings in Mr Udemezue’s Rejoinder. None appears to survive

Introduction

The question sounds small: how should Counsel address a female Judge? The answer decides how a learned profession speaks to the women who now lead it. A recent article in these pages concluded that the correct mode is My Lady or Your Ladyship. Mr Sylvester Udemezue has contradicted that conclusion here, with a courtesy this reply returns. His case stands on three legs: that My Lord is a technical title of the judicial office, like consideration; that Nigeria has its own settled convention; and that reform belongs to the competent institutions. Each leg breaks in turn.

1. Only a Person Can Be Spoken To

An office is an idea. It has no ears and wears no robe. When counsel rises, the words travel to the human being on the Bench, and every English form of direct address, Sir, Madam, My Lord, My Lady, is shaped to fit that person. Madam itself is the French ma dame, which means my lady, so every lawyer who has said Madam to a woman has already conceded the case.

Nor is Your Lordship an escape, for it is only My Lord said more politely, and its partner is Your Ladyship. His point that My Lord does not turn a female Justice into a man answers an argument nobody made, for a wrong description never changes the thing described; it only discredits the describer.

Now comes the decisive point, and it is his own concession. His section on the history records that when women reached the English Bench, the practice adapted to My Lady. Pause on that. If the address belonged to the office, no adaptation would have been needed, because only the persons had changed. His own history proves that the address follows the person.

The whole tradition testifies the same way. The Crown of the United Kingdom never dies, yet on 8 September 2022 the Queen’s Bench became the King’s Bench, R changed from Regina to Rex, and every Queen’s Counsel woke a King’s Counsel. The same English High Court makes a male appointee a Knight and a female a Dame, and Brenda Hale led the United Kingdom’s final court as Lady Hale, never as Lord Hale. If the sovereign, the bench and the silk gown all bend their style to the person, why would the Nigerian courtroom alone stand outside grammar?

2. A Term of Art Needs a Maker, and This One Has None

His most interesting argument is this: courtroom language is technical, like consideration or injunction, so My Lord has become a sexless technical title meaning simply the Judge. The premise is correct, and it destroys the conclusion, because every technical meaning in the law exists only because some authority created it. Judgments fixed the meaning of consideration, statutes fixed the meaning of service, and his own best example, the corporation that counts as a person, exists only because section 18(1) of the Interpretation Act says so. No special meaning floats free; every one has a maker.

So the question is simple: who made this one? Where is the statute, Rule of Court or Practice Direction which says that My Lord means a Judge of either sex? There is none, and he concedes it, for no instrument, on his own account, touches the point. That concession decides the issue, because a claimed meaning with no authority behind it is only a habit in Latin dress. A second difficulty follows: every word on his list is spoken about, while My Lord is spoken to a living person’s face, so they are not even the same kind of word.

His remaining comparisons fail the same tests. The reasonable man is an imaginary figure, spoken about and never spoken to, and the law is retiring him in favour of the reasonable person, an example of the law correcting a masculine form. Genesis uses man for the species and then pairs the persons, “male and female created he them”, and nowhere is Eve addressed as Sir.

The claim that My Lord has quietly evolved into a neutral title fails its own test. A meaning changes only when the whole community accepts the new one without protest, and this very debate proves the usage contested rather than changed. If the word were truly neutral, nobody would resist My Lady; yet they resist her with energy, and the heat of the defence gives the meaning away. Even a vacation greeting among female Judges saluted Dear Sisters while hoping that my Lords were enjoying the holiday, in which no office was being addressed at all.

3. Lord Has Had Its Feminine for a Thousand Years

The comparison with the female Professor mixes up two families of words. Professor, Doctor, Judge and Justice are common gender words, for which English made no feminine forms, so the one form serves both sexes and no error is possible. Lord is not of that family, because English has kept its pair for a thousand years. The rule is simple. Where no pair exists, the single form is neutral. Where the pair exists, the masculine for a woman is an error, which is why in eight centuries of the peerage no woman has ever been My Lord. Titles transcend grammatical gender only where the language gave them no gender to transcend.

The pair is older than the courtroom. The hlafweard who kept the loaf became the Lord, and the hlaefdige who made it became the Lady. Two titles, one kitchen. And England has now placed a Lady Chief Justice at the very summit of its judiciary.

4. Sovereign Over Laws, Not Over English

Three answers dispose of his arguments from sovereignty, reception and settled convention.

First, they answer a claim that nobody made. The English materials were offered as evidence of what English words mean, never as law binding Nigeria. Nigeria is sovereign over its laws, but no nation is sovereign over English, the official language of Nigeria’s superior courts of record: Ojengbede v Esan (2001) 18 NWLR (Pt. 746) 771 at 790, per Iguh, JSC. Having kept the language, Nigeria kept its grammar, and reception is beside the point, because a form of address is a use of language, not a rule of law.

The second answer lies in the dates. No Nigerian convention on addressing female Judges could exist before 1969, when the first female judge was elevated, and by then England’s first, sitting from 1965, was already addressed as My Lady, and the Practice Note of 1994 brands the contrary contortion “plainly absurd”. The universal masculine is therefore a local drift younger than the correct usage, and it has never even been uniform, because Lagos accepts My Lady.

Third, the patriotism of the argument is odd, for it invokes sovereignty to preserve a colonial form which the coloniser itself has discarded as absurd, and that is not independence but the careful keeping of another country’s mistake.

5. “Should Nigeria Change?” Concedes the Field

He insists that reform must come from the competent institutions and not from individual preference. That argument surrenders the case, because no institution ever prescribed the universal masculine either. The field is empty of authority in both directions, and nothing, on his own account, prohibits My Lady, so counsel who says it breaks no rule and speaks correct English besides. The universal My Lord may be legal in the thin sense that no law forbids it, but correct it is not, and correctness was the claim of his title.

Nor is the machinery any mystery: a Practice Note settled England in 1994, and one memorandum of the Chief Justice settled Ghana. The question was never whether the pen of a head of court can settle the matter, but what that pen should write, and an advocate’s part is to give every reason, never to direct.

6. “We Are All Gentlemen at the Bar”

He says that the old maxim that all members of the Bar are gentlemen expressed unity rather than exclusion. History answers otherwise, for the saying was simply a description of who was in the room. For six centuries women were excluded by law, from the Mirror of Justices, through Coke and Blackstone, to Bebb v Law Society [1914] 1 Ch 286, where a woman was held not to be a “person” under the Solicitors Act 1843. The Act of 1919 admitted women to the profession, not to the fiction, and a fiction that died in 1919 cannot dictate anyone’s grammar in 2026. His own defence speaks of the professional fraternity, from frater, a brother, so the vocabulary confesses the gender it denies.

7. His Own Survey Contains No Ally

His comparative survey convicts him. The United Kingdom pairs the address; Australia, Singapore and the American courts use neutral forms; India debates respectful alternatives; South Africa pairs; Ghana was paired by memorandum; and British Columbia went neutral in 2021. Every jurisdiction matches the address to the person or adopts a truly neutral form, and not one on earth decrees the masculine universal. Forms of address are, as he himself says, products of legal culture rather than immutable doctrine. Exactly so, and cultures correct their errors.

8. The Learned Cannot Plead Convention Against Grammar

Beneath all his points lies one general plea, that professional usage should prevail over grammar. The profession’s own proudest title answers it. The three learned professions, divinity, law and medicine, were trained on the liberal arts, whose first subject was grammar, and the canons of interpretation, with their Latin names like ejusdem generis, are nothing but grammar in a gown. A profession that decides other people’s disputes by their grammar cannot insist in open court that a lady is a lord and then plead convention when corrected. Nigeria cannot build its legal system on defended bad English.

Every plea of convention here rests, besides, on a world that no longer exists. The exclusively male Bar is extinct, and Nigeria itself retired The Honourable Mr Justice within a few years of its first female Judges. The present change needs no invention, because it is already written on the face of the language: My Lady.

9. Equality, and His Closing Line

He urges that this is no contest about gender equality, and up to a point he is right, because the question is decided on grammar before equality enters. But one premise cannot be waved away. In 1914, Bebb refused to read “person” as including a woman, to keep her out, even though the statute said the masculine included the feminine. Today, some read “Lord” as including her, to keep her invisible. The readings run opposite ways, yet they rest on one premise, that the standard occupant of the law’s dignities is male. The Act of 1919 buried that premise in law, and it should now be buried in speech, before a Bench led by a woman, Hon. Justice Kudirat Kekere-Ekun, GCON, the Chief Justice of Nigeria.

His closing line, that the strength of the judiciary never depended on words of salutation, points against him. If nothing turns on the word, then accuracy costs nothing. If the word merits ten sections of defence, then it merits being right. Either way My Lady wins, for she is not a lesser form of My Lord but its exact equal, differing only as the person differs.

Conclusion

Count what he has conceded. England, the source of the tradition, pairs the address and adapted the moment women arrived. No Nigerian instrument prescribes the universal masculine, and none forbids My Lady. The competent institutions are free to settle the matter. And his survey of the world found no ally. What remains is a single sentence, that it has been done this way for decades, and that is an autobiography, not an argument. Habit is not correctness, and convention cannot repeal grammar.

The office cannot be addressed, because offices have no ears. A female Judge is My Lady or Your Ladyship, a male Judge is My Lord or Your Lordship, and a mixed Bench is My Lords and My Ladies, or simply the Court. At the Bar, follow the preference of the Judge before you, because respect for the Bench admits of no exception, and where she has expressed none, the default is correct English. But, forbearance is not agreement. It is the person who wears the robe, and it is the person the Bar addresses. Let the proper thing be done.

Eyimofe Atake, SAN, PhD (Cantab)