The Judicial Afterlife

Once upon a time judges might have been expected to be relatively quiescent in retirement. If they did not die in office, they took on the kind of voluntary roles associated with the retired great and the good: sitting on the boards of charities, taking on visiting academic roles and in more senior cases speaking in the Lords. In the past 25 years, however, there has been a significant increase in the phenomenon of paid work for retired judges. Judges (especially senior judges) take on arbitration and mediation roles, or consultant roles in law firms, or litigation advisory roles. Many active judges do all of these things. 

This microsite has been created to support our research project on The Judicial Afterlife: What do judges do after they leave the bench? (1950-2020). Our research looks at the changing profile of judges' activity in retirement, what retired judges do, and what they should (or shouldn't) do. We gratefully acknowledge the support of a British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grant (grant no. SRG2021\210049) for our research and a supporting workshop for judges, officials and professionals.

Patrick O'Brien (Oxford Brookes)

Ben Yong (Durham)

Policy Report published, June 2023

Our policy report, Work in Judicial Retirement, was published Wednesday 28th June 2023. To read the report click here. Our headline conclusion is that judicial retirement is now, in effect, unregulated in England and Wales, and we recommend some regulatory responses.

Database of judges activity in retirement, 1950-2020

As part of our project we collected and analysed data on the post-bench activity of all UK judges who retired between 1950 and 2020. On this page, you can view an edited version of this database. The search queries show

1. Biographical data for all judges, including when they were appointed and retired, the highest court they reached 

2. Coded data for what judges did in retirement for all those judges who are no longer alive

For the codebook for the data click here .

We are very grateful to Sam Anderson for his work on the database and on this website.