Diversity In The Justice System

Lady Hale’s 2015 forward speech given at Birmingham University raised an important and controversial issue of diversity. It had created a new wave of discourse about diversity which increased the pressure for more representation, not only in the justices of the Supreme Court, but also in the justice system as a whole. Since then, another female supreme court judge, Lady Black was appointed, and the judiciary has been working with multiple organisations to improve the selection and appointments process. However, improvements in diversity statistics have not been impressive, with an average of 5% increase of female judges in all courts and even lesser increase for ethnic’s minorities in the courts. This shows that the issue is as relevant as

The justice system exists to enforce the rule of law and protect rights of the people, with great importance placed on upholding fairness. Courts are the final arbiter between the citizen and the state, and are therefore a fundamental pillar of the constitution, this quote shows that the courts and the whole of the justice system is important to maintain law and order in today’s society. With the supreme court itself being a form of check and balance for the executive power, but still maintaining the importance of parliament sovereignty. They exist, as can be seen in the quote by lady hale, that it should serve the needs of the UK justice system.
There are many discussions in deciding what the needs of the UK justice system is, but with all justice system, it revolves around four pillars, retribution, rehabilitation, closure and punishment. There are many complaints nowadays, with the biasness that exist against minorities, either sex or ethnic in the justice system. Therefore, the justice system, especially the supreme court must take care in doing their part of stopping the intrenched system of racism and sexism. But how must one do that, if diversity does not

What we truly need is a good balance between meritocracy and affirmative action, so we can maximize the positive effects from both sides of the coin. A good example of this would be where two persons are of equal merit, there is no prevention for preferring one individual over the other for the purpose of increasing diversity within the group . However, one could argue that merits in itself is a subjective issue. Different people would put more importance on certain merits over others. In Lady Hale’s speech itself, she said “how do you rate each candidate against each desirable quality and how do you rate each quality against the others? So, you might well end up with candidates who were equally well-qualified, but for different