A leading lawyer has received “substantial” damages and an apology from the Times over a misleading report that claimed she had been censured by her professional regulator.
The story, published in November, concerned controversy over Dinah Rose KC representing the Cayman Islands government in opposing same-sex marriage in a case at the privy council.
Rose, the president of Oxford’s Magdalen College, faced criticism by LGBTQ+ rights campaigners for taking the case. She countered that it was her professional obligation to accept the case under the “cab rank” rule, but this was disputed in a Times story headlined “Law chiefs rule against Magdalen College head in Caymans gay rights row”, which led to her suing the newspaper and its legal editor, Jonathan Ames.
The report quoted the Bar Standards Board (BSB) as having told Colours Caribbean, a campaign group, that Rose’s interpretation of the cab rank rules “might possibly amount to evidence of recklessness” if “taken at its highest”.
In a statement read at the high court in central London on Tuesday, Rose’s lawyer William Bennett KC said she had been “shocked and distressed” by the article.
“The article reported claims by a gay rights campaign group based in the Cayman Islands that Ms Rose had wrongly claimed that she had been professionally obliged to accept the instructions when in fact she had not,” he said.
The BSB issued a public statement the day after the Times article, clarifying its position and apologising to Rose “if this has not been made sufficiently clear”.
An apology published in the Times on Tuesday said: “We accept that under the constitutional principles which she [Rose] cited, the bar rules did not allow her to refuse a brief for the Cayman Islands government in a case concerning the right to same-sex marriage. The article was therefore misleading. We apologise to Ms Rose for the distress caused, and have agreed to pay her substantial damages and legal costs.”
