About Jonathan Sumption, Lord Sumption
Jonathan Philip Chadwick Sumption, Lord Sumption, (born 9 December 1948), is a British author, medieval historian, barrister and former senior judge who sat on the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom between 2012 and 2018 and on the Hong Kong Court of Final Appeal between 2019 and 2024. Sumption was sworn in as a Justice of the Supreme Court on 11 January 2012, succeeding Lawrence Collins, Baron Collins of Mapesbury. Exceptionally, he was appointed to the Supreme Court directly from the practising bar, without having been a full-time judge. He retired from the Supreme Court on 9 December 2018 upon reaching the mandatory retirement age of 70. Sumption is well known for his role as a barrister in many legal cases. They include appearances in the Hutton Inquiry on HM Government's behalf, in the Three Rivers case, his representation of former Cabinet Minister Stephen Byers and the Department for Transport in the Railtrack private shareholders' action against the British Government in 2005, for defending HM Government in an appeal hearing brought by Binyam Mohamed, and for successfully defending Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich in a private lawsuit brought by Boris Berezovsky. A former academic, Sumption wrote a substantial narrative history of the Hundred Years' War in five volumes. He was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2003 New Year Honours and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society (FRHistS) and a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London (FSA). In 2019, he was appointed a Fellow of the Society of Writers to His Majesty's Signet (FWS). He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (FRSL) in 2025.
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