Ever since Brenda Hale stepped down as president of the supreme court in 2020, it has not been difficult to find lawyers who worried that her more judicially conservative successor, Robert Reed, would be anxious to avoid standing up to the UK government in the way that the Hale court did so dramatically over the prorogation of parliament in 2019.
Those fears now look to have been seriously misjudged, after the Reed court today unanimously dismissed the government’s policy of transferring asylum seekers to Rwanda. Lord Reed is a different kind of judicial thinker from Lady Hale. He can certainly argue that the judgment was impeccably conservative in legal terms. But the ruling is in many ways a more consequential and devastating rebuff to UK government and UK politics than even the Hale judgment.
