When we are thinking about the people who hand down legal judgments our wishful thinking lets us hope that they are entirely neutral and applying the law in an even and fair-handed way. In reality we know they aren’t some sort of semi-divine beings who hand down justice from above but are as human as the rest of us. They are products of their upbringing, their education and the various influences throughout their life. It is not made public but they have opinions about all the political issues of the day: from Brexit to benefits; COVID to class sizes. Heck a majority have probably already worked out that Lenny Henry is Blob on the Masked Singer.

We tend to see this in interviews that are given after retirement when judges can afford to be a bit more frank and let their personality shine through. Lady Hale has given many interviews since her departure from the Supreme Court while Lord Sumption’s tirades have often made headlines.

This puts us in a difficult position: we know that judges will have conscious and unconscious biases so the question shifts to how much bias are we prepared to accept?

Unfortunately our legal system’s best answer to this question is a return to the old adage: Not only must Justice be done; it must also be seen to be done. In other words as long as it looks like the judge isn’t biased then everything is fine. That might have been fine when R v Sussex Justices, ex p. McCarthy was decided in 1923 but I think we can do a little better now.

We can be grown-up and admit that biases are there while acknowledging they are a product of social factors such as class, race and gender. The obvious conclusion is that if we can have a diversity of opinions then it doesn’t remove bias but hopefully mixes things up enough that overall you end up in something approaching the middle ground. It’s never going to be perfect (all judges need to be law graduates and that comes with its own biases) but it has to be better than what we have at the moment.

The UK Supreme Court has never had a non-white Justice; the majority are men; none are younger than 60; all are from what would be considered top-level universities. It doesn’t take a genius to work out that their decisions are going to be somewhat skewed by these facts.

Appointing a more diverse pool of judges and encouraging those who do not fit into the classic mould into these positions is not political correctness, it’s about getting better and more legitimate legal decisions.