Treasurer's Lecture [IN PERSON] Master Eleanor Sharpston - I'm a practitioner - so does morality have anything to do with my daily work as a lawyer?

Guest Speaker: Master Eleanor Sharpston

Title: I'm a practitioner - so does morality have anything to do with my daily work as a lawyer?

Master Sharpston has plenty of entertaining anecdotes about her life as a woman in a male world at the Bar. One relates to her pupillage training in 1980. “I did a mock plea in mitigation and was ‘rewarded’ by having the trainer, who had been downright vicious to two other women in the group, growl at me, ‘I suppose if we have got to have you bloody women at the Bar it’s at least easier to listen to one who sounds like a bloke.’”

An intellectual mastermind, who battled great financial and social obstacles in establishing herself as one of the most distinguished contemporary lawyers of our generation, becoming Advocate General at the European Court of Justice, delivers our first Treasurer's Lecture of the year in celebration of International Women's Day.

Eleanor was the first woman put forward by the UK to serve as a member (in her case, as an Advocate General) at the Court of Justice of the European Union (the ‘CJEU’ – more often known, albeit incorrectly, as the European Court of Justice (‘ECJ’)). However, her struggle to become a barrister was so difficult that she would have given up if she were not, as she put it in an interview with Alison Maitland, “impossibly stubborn”. 

Despite the support of Middle Temple in two major scholarships, supplemented by work as a freelance motorcycle courier, she faced huge financial and social impediments upon arriving at the Bar. She stumbled upon the news that additional posts for ‘référendaires’ (judicial assistants) were about to be made available at the ECJ. Before the news became public, she leapt onto her 250cc motorbike and drove from London to Luxembourg so that she might ‘drop in’ on Sir Gordon Slynn, the British Advocate General at the time, for whom she had done work during her second Middle Temple scholarship. Her initiative - and skills as a motorcyclist - paid off, and she ended up working for Sir Gordon for three years, before finally achieving tenancy in London. It took Eleanor 10 years from her Call at Middle Temple in 1980 to obtain her tenancy practicing in EU law at 4 Paper Buildings (now Hailsham Chambers).

Since she now had a full tenancy but no practice, Eleanor took on two jobs – sadly, with only a single salary – at University College London to support herself financially: as a lecturer in EC law and as Director of European Legal Studies (a comparative law role). She took silk in 1999, at a time when one-third of her mixed EC and ECHR practice was pro bono. After serving as joint head of Hailsham Chambers in London and following many high-profile cases both before the UK courts (such as R v Brown (sadomasochists convicted of assault for consensual sex) and R v Thoburn (‘Metric Martyr’)) and before the ECJ, she was appointed by the Member States collectively to serve as an Advocate General.

Eleanor’s appointment as an Advocate General was terminated prematurely by the Member States following Brexit. The General Court and then the ECJ refused to accept jurisdiction to hear her challenge to that decision. Joshua Rozenberg wrote that the CJEU had “done itself untold damage” by the way it treated her. Academic commentators have also criticised the CJEU’s timid approach to the scope of judicial review of Member States’ decisions that clearly take effect exclusively within the EU legal order and that deprive the individual adversely affected thereby of access to a court and an effective remedy.

Sadly (and contrary to UK constitutional tradition), the three last British Members of the ‘European courts’ – Judge Christopher Vajda (CJEU), Judge Ian Forrester (General Court: Master Forrester of this Inn) and Advocate General Eleanor Sharpston – have received no recognition from HMG for their years of service there. However, in June 2021, HRH Grand Duke Henri of Luxembourg made Eleanor a Grand Officier of the Ordre du Mérite du Grand-Duché de Luxembourg in recognition of her work at the CJEU.

In her lecture, Eleanor will be discussing – sometimes very seriously, but occasionally with a slight twinkle in her eye – some of the real issues that arise for a practitioner or a member of the judiciary, out there on the street, when law meets morality and the two don’t seem quite to line up together. Is it ok to say, ‘I’m a practitioner, I just advise on the existing legal texts and carry out my instructions?’ How ‘activist’ can you – should you – be (and in what way) if you are convinced that a literal reading of the text is going to lead to a grave injustice? How far does the rule of law depend on your individual action and how far can it be left to ‘others’ to safeguard?    

In case you are not yet convinced to join Eleanor at the Inn on 8 March, perhaps we might highlight some of her pursuits outside of the law. As well as her enthusiasm for motorcycles, she is a keen amateur musician, primarily playing viola, violin and piano, with a bit of classical guitar thrown in for good measure. She is also a black belt in Shotokan karate (having, in an earlier life, won Blues for rowing and squash) and enjoys playing characters completely different from the grave barrister or advocate general during the annual Luxembourg European Amateur Theatre Summer School (LEATSS).