Early life

Born Ann Elizabeth Oldfield Havers in Buckinghamshire to Sir Cecil Havers, a judge, she was sister to the late Lord Chancellor, the Lord Havers, and is aunt to his sons, the actor Nigel Havers and Philip Havers QC. She was educated at Broomfield House School in Kew in west London, and Wycombe Abbey School in High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire, followed by a year at the University of Lausanne.

Legal career

She was called to the Bar from the Inner Temple in 1955. In 1958, she married Joseph Butler-Sloss. She was appointed a Registrar at the Principal Registry of the Family Division in 1970. In 1979, she became the fourth woman to be appointed a High Court judge, after Elizabeth Lane, Rose Heilbron, and Margaret Booth. As were all previous female High Court judges, she was assigned to the Family Division. She was also made a Dame Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (DBE).

In 1988, she became the first woman appointed as a Lord Justice of Appeal (judge of the Court of Appeal), having chaired the Cleveland child abuse inquiry in the previous year. In 1999, she became President of the Family Division of the High Court of Justice, the first woman to hold this position and the highest-ranking woman judge in the United Kingdom until Brenda Hale became the first female Lord of Appeal in Ordinary, in January 2004.

She was advanced to the rank of Dame Grand Cross of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (GBE) in the 2005 New Year Honours. On 12 January 2005, it was announced that she was retiring, being replaced as President of the Family Division by Sir Mark Potter, then a Lord Justice of Appeal.

On 3 May 2006, it was announced by the House of Lords Appointments Commission that she would be one of seven new life peers – so-called ‘people’s peers’. She was created Baroness Butler-Sloss, of Marsh Green in the County of Devon, on 13 June 2006.[8] On 4 August 2006 she was appointed to the Court of Ecclesiastical Causes Reserved for a period of five years.

On 7 September 2006 she was appointed as Deputy Coroner of the Queen’s Household and Assistant Deputy Coroner for Surrey for the purpose of hearing the inquest into the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. On 2 March 2007, she was appointed as Assistant Deputy Coroner for Inner West London for the purpose of transferring the jurisdiction of the inquest to Inner West London so that the proceedings may sit in the Royal Courts of Justice. On 24 April 2007, she announced she was stepping down in June 2007, saying she lacked the experience required to deal with an inquest with a jury. The role of coroner for the inquests was transferred to Lord Justice Scott Baker. This had been preceded by the overturning by the High Court of her earlier decision to hold the inquest without a jury.

She became Chancellor of the University of the West of England in 1993 and an Honorary Fellow of St Hilda’s College, Oxford, Peterhouse, Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, King’s College London, the Royal College of Physicians, the Royal College of Psychiatrists and the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health. She sits on the Selection Panel for Queen’s Counsel. In December 2004 she was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Laws from the University of Bath, and in June 2005 she was awarded an honorary degree from the Open University as Doctor of the University. She is Chairman of the Security Commission.

Dame Elizabeth, (85 @ 2014), was thrust into the public eye in the late 1980s during the Cleveland child abuse inquiry which resulted in the Children Act of 1989.

The act incorporated many of her recommendations aimed at ensuring that children were not removed from parents unless absolutely necessary.

TAP – so what happened?