‘There was said to be little “red in tooth and claw” litigation in Chancery, but that is what I wanted. I joined the Chambers where I got it. I am basically a court animal. People live at a higher level of consciousness in court. I like the cut and thrust of the battle. You get a better answer when people argue adversarially. And best of all when they do it orally, face to face.

‘There is said to be a spectrum between two extremes among judges when it comes to deciding cases. Some judges try to make up their minds from the first moment but may change it one way or the other as the arguments flow. At the other extreme is the judge who listens with a quiet mind and then waits a fortnight to let the dust settle before deciding. I am more productive if I can decide while a case is fresh in my mind, especially when there are so many cases to get through.’

I am sitting with Lord Briggs in his room in the Supreme Court. He has just finished a busy year as Treasurer of Lincoln’s Inn. ‘I was in chambers in Lincoln’s. The Inn was my corporate mentor, especially as I had no background in the law. Being Treasurer has been an opportunity to put something back. I am a big fan of the Inns. They are dedicated to the rule of law and access to justice, mainly achieved by a huge pro bono effort by members providing training in advocacy, oral and written, and in ethics.’

Pictures of his two very old wooden yachts adorn the walls. He has been a sailor from age three, unsurprisingly for the son and grandson of members of the Royal Navy. His grandfather had commanded the first naval air raid in World War I, was shot down, escaped and became a member of the first cohort to join the newly founded Royal Air Force in 1918. Lord Briggs was named after his father’s elder brother, Michael, who was killed in a Spitfire in World War II.

‘My mother was in the Wrens and – as was the practice in those days – was sacked when she became pregnant with me. Mum had told me that I could argue the hind legs off a donkey. It was this idea of being able to do “directed speaking” that decided me on the Bar, even before my A Levels. I didn’t have a love of the law as such, I didn’t study law at university and I didn’t go in for debating, matters which were put to me at my interview at Lincoln’s Inn!

‘We lived in Portsmouth or Plymouth, depending on where my father’s ship was based at the time.’ He boarded from the age of six, first at Marlborough House, then Charterhouse. ‘I was hopeless at games. At Marlborough House I was on the “Unathletics Committee”, a group created by our enlightened school to ensure we were not left out. I remember using a white-line marker on the grass to prepare the cricket pitch for one David Gower, a fellow pupil. But I could shoot, and that was a minor sport. At Charterhouse the ethos was: ‘We fail as a school if we don’t cater for the skill sets of every one of our pupils, however strange.’ I did sailing, another minor sport. Up to O Levels I was divided between maths and the arts. When I opted for the arts, my maths teacher got upset. He said I would need maths at the Bar. He was correct! But I had a great love of history. I did a lot of music – clarinet, bass clarinet, bagpipes and above all singing – and I ended up with a choral scholarship at Magdalen Oxford to sing and study history.

‘On my first day of pupillage in 1978 at what is now Serle Court, I observed the daunting sight of my pupil master talking on the phone to ten different solicitors about ten different cases in a few minutes, and remembering the detail of all. I thought, how will I ever be able to do that?’ Briggs went to a common law/commercial set for his second six. ‘I was on my feet for six months doing knockabout advocacy and serious commercial opinion writing, so I wasn’t terrified when I had my first day on my feet in the Chancery Division, after pupillage.

‘In my early years of practice I got on the AG’s [Attorney General’s] panel, mainly for directors’ disqualification and insolvency. I did a mix of Chancery and commercial, including a lot of civil fraud. I was often on the side of the supposed bad guys; it was a really good time, with lots of Mareva orders and Anton Pillers and a few gentlemanly trust-bust cases.

‘Because I would always want to say yes to cases outside my practice area, I was thought by the solicitors and directories to be a specialist in a large number of areas, but I was really just a generalist! Any counsel has to master the subject-matter underlying a case – whether legal or technical – before doing a trial, especially if cross-examining an expert. You have to do the homework.’

Silk came in 1994 and, for five years from 2000, appointments as AG to the Duchy of Lancaster and Deputy High Court Judge. ‘I had had my collar felt for the judiciary and in due course I made a written application to become a Chancery High Court Judge in 2006.’ His later moves to the Court of Appeal (in 2013) and Supreme Court (in 2017) were through open competitions.

‘My judicial practice was wider in the Court of Appeal than it is here. When a panel is chosen for the Court of Appeal it sits together for some time, during which time it takes everything that gets slung at it. But in the Supreme Court a separate panel is chosen for each case. I tend to get chosen for my specialist areas of business and property, but I also do my share of public law, crime, family and pure common law and personal injury.’ Isn’t public law more robust than his former Chancery practice? ‘Not so. In public law there is an extraordinary habit of believing everything people say in their affidavits!’

Advice to counsel? ‘When you get to the Supreme Court as counsel, you are involved in a collegiate exercise designed to solve a point of law of general public importance, transcending the parties’ interests. Flexibility is highly regarded, especially if it becomes clear that your original argument is not finding favour. “From discussion comes wisdom”: that’s on my coat of arms. All oral advocacy has to be like this – a two-way conversation with the court, or you might just as well rely purely on a written submission. Counsel must engage and move with the debate as it develops.

‘We are remarkably well-served in the Privy Council [PC]. Barristers who have travelled from their home country to address the court constantly impress us by their quality, their brevity and by their old-world courtesy. Some PC hearings happen online but the cut and thrust remains. Our video kit – crucially – enables us all to see and hear counsel on screen just as clearly is if they were there in person.’

Other aspects of the job? ‘Lecturing can be more frightening than judging. There is no opportunity for correction by my colleagues. I stand up before lantern-jawed, steely-eyed academics, who won’t hesitate to say where I went wrong. I had a reputation for procedural reform, having led two reviews of the civil courts, but I’ve now mainly left the field to others. I thought – and I still do – that good IT is a vital key to access to justice. When I came here, I became the guinea pig for going paper-free. I was the first to be paper-free, except for my notes – as a two-finger typist I can’t type and look at counsel at the same time. I went paper-free 18 months before Lockdown. By Lockdown three colleagues were on board. A week after the start of Lockdown we all were. There was no other way in which we could have provided a timely service.

‘Over the years the civil justice system has become much less transparent. When I started as a barrister there was no pre-reading. Everything would be read out in court. Oral evidence would be given in chief. A visitor to the court would hear the same as the judge, could fully understand what was going on, and “mark” the judge. That’s all changed. A great deal more pre-reading is now required. It’s not done now for counsel to read out more than a couple of lines from a citation. It’s left to the judge to read the rest, then or later. We have recently taken a first step towards full transparency in this court by making the parties’ written cases in new appeals publicly available on our website some days before the hearing. Previously they were confidential until they were read out. I would like to get the court bundle publicly available on screen – redacted of course for anything genuinely confidential. Every time I say this to academics they all say “Go for it!” On the other hand, the solicitors say “Who is going to pay for redacting the bundle?” It’s an issue I discuss with our colleagues and senior staff and with lawyers and academics, so as to get an informed professional reaction.

‘There are still things about computers that drive me up the wall. I am not the most computer literate person. But I can work online with my laptop almost anywhere: in my London flat, my study in the country and even in my boat.’

In his gap year he was a senior sailing instructor. ‘I did think about joining the Royal Navy, but my father and I agreed that the Navy couldn’t offer the kind of career I would have enjoyed.’ He met his future wife when he helped to interview her (‘sort of’) for a place in Chambers. At the end of one long fraught case, which they did together after the client had dispensed with all the more senior members of the team two weeks before the hearing, they went away on holiday to Venice and returned almost engaged. His wife is now a mediator. They have four children, none of whom has gone into law. But they all sail.

‘I still sing in my local church choir. I was even allowed to sing in the Lincoln’s Inn choir during the service to mark my incoming as Treasurer. As a Christian of a slightly traditional Anglican flavour, I have accommodated myself to the big and welcome changes that have occurred in social morality in my lifetime, without that coming at all into conflict with my faith. Being a judge requires me to leave my religion outside the court door, but judges have to take account of the shared values which underlie principles of conscience in their equitable jurisdiction. A fellow judge once suggested in her dissenting judgment that I was applying to commercial business the morals of the vicarage.’

His lead judgment in Guest v Guest [2022] UKSC 27 was a classic example in the field of proprietary estoppel:

The restraint of that which is contrary to conscience lies at the heart of equity.