Introduction: Diversity and the JAC’s First Ten Years

This is an age of diversity. In a pluralistic polity such as the UK, diversity often serves as shorthand for a series of related questions about how best to respond to our mutual differences of, amongst other things, gender, race, sexuality and social background. Over the last twenty-five years or so there has been growing recognition that these questions are as relevant to the courts and tribunals as for other areas of public life. Today, across the UK, there is widespread agreement that the judiciary should reflect the society it serves. Especially welcome is the evidence in recent years that this agreement traverses the judicial and political spheres, with the need for faster and more visible progress on judicial diversity increasingly acknowledged across the ideological spectrum. There is, in other words, a political salience to debates about judicial diversity largely absent just a few years ago. This has significant spill-over effects for the design, working and assessment of judicial appointments: previously relatively discrete debates about the independence, legitimacy and accountability of the appointments regime are frequently now framed in terms of, and by reference to, widely shared concerns about the need for judges who are more visibly reflective of society. Diversity is not the only goal of a selection regime of course, but it has begun to shape how those other goals are viewed. In brief, there is now such widespread agreement about its importance that judicial diversity ‘has in recent years become a truth almost universally acknowledged’