Outspoken when highlighting injustice, Sir James Munby became skilled at inserting resonating rebukes that embarrassed the government into his judgments.
As president of the high court’s family division when cuts to legal aid were depriving litigants of representation and NHS services failing to provide patients with appropriate treatment, he challenged ministers directly where he believed it necessary.
Munby, who has died aged 77 of a heart attack, dared to test the constitutional issue of who controls the public purse in a series of cases in which he proposed that HM Courts and Tribunals Service pay for lawyers in defiance of Ministry of Justice restrictions.
In one hearing where the couple were unable to represent themselves, Munby asked what could be worse for a parent than having their child permanently taken away? “The state has simply washed its hands of the problem,” he observed. It was “a denial of justice. The child is also entitled to a fair trial.”
Having effectively chastened the authorities into granting legal aid, Munby described it in a subsequent judgment as an “unedifying story” of parents fighting “to obtain from a grudging state the assistance which was essential if justice was to be done”.
In a separate case in 2017 concerning mental health facilities, Munby said the nation would have “blood on its hands” if an NHS hospital bed could not be found for a teenage girl at risk of taking her own life.
The case exposed the “disgraceful and utterly shaming lack of proper provision … of clinical, residential and other support services,” he stated. Despite efforts to find specialist care where she could be monitored safely, “I might as well have been talking to myself in the middle of the Sahara.”
Praised for his fairness and erudition, Munby was a pioneer in introducing more open justice into the family courts and a supporter of “no fault” divorce. His judicial career was distinguished by “moral clarity and compassion for the vulnerable”, the chair of the Bar council, Kirsty Brimelow KC, said. “His judgments often were likened to the writings of Charles Dickens as he railed against and sought to remedy social injustice. And he did just that, one case at a time.”
Born in Oxford, James was the son of Mary (nee Dicks) and Denys Munby. His mother was a researcher in the university’s psychiatry department. His father was a reader in transport economics at Oxford university who had been a conscientious objector during the second world war.
James was the eldest of five children. For a period the family lived in Aberdeen; he was educated first in Scotland then at Magdalen College school, Oxford. He then spent a year as a labourer and pursued his passionate interest in steam trains – including working on the footplate, shovelling coal.
In 1970, he graduated from Wadham College, Oxford, where he gained a first in law and won the university’s Eldon law scholarship. He was called to the bar the following year, joining New Square Chambers. He practised in the chancery division and also specialised in family cases. In 1977, he married Jennifer Beckhough, a fellow barrister.
Made a silk in 1988, he was regularly employed by the official solicitor so that he could apply his persuasive advocacy to medical treatment and consent cases. He appeared in the House of Lords in the case of Anthony Bland, who had been left in a permanent vegetative state by the Hillsborough disaster.
In 2000, Munby was appointed a high court judge and assigned to the family division. Nine years later he was promoted to the court of appeal and made chairman of the Law Commission, the body responsible for recommending legislative reforms.
A champion of greater transparency in the family courts, Munby dismissed the application for a blanket ban on reporting the divorce proceedings between Earl Spencer and his former wife, Caroline.
In 2013, he was made president of the family division, where he published guidance opening up reporting of the court of protection, in order to improve “public understanding” and confidence in the legal system for those lacking mental capacity.
His energetic leadership drove through reforms, reducing waiting times in care cases. Renowned for a lack of patience when dealing with what he considered nonsense, he was once described as giving “an impression of a volcano about to explode”. He suggested separating the process of divorce from more protracted disputes over division of a couple’s assets and called for legal rights for unmarried, cohabiting couples to protect them from injustice if they separated.
Munby stood down in 2018 on reaching the compulsory judicial retirement age of 70. At his valedictory speech, he explained that neither his wife nor daughter (who had just given birth) could be present because the “interests of the child are paramount” – a legal in-joke greeted with applause.
To mark the occasion, Munby, who never learned to drive, was taken by fellow judges and court staff to the Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch miniature steam railway in Kent where an engine was renamed “The Flying Munby” for the day.
He remained active, chairing, until 2023, the Nuffield Family Justice Observatory, which monitors the family courts. In a Guardian article the following year, he criticised the shortage of places in secure children’s homes for youngsters with mental health needs. He also raised widely debated concerns over the sufficiency of legal safeguards in the assisted dying legislation currently being considered by parliament.
Munby is survived by Jennifer, two children, Thomas, who is a barrister, and Charlotte, and four grandchildren.
• James Lawrence Munby, barrister and judge, born 27 July 1948; died 1 January 2026
