Ann Elizabeth Oldfield Havers was born on 10 August 1933 into a distinguished legal family. Her father, Sir Cecil Havers, was a High Court judge best remembered for passing the death sentence on Ruth Ellis, the last woman hanged in Britain. Her brother Michael rose to become Attorney General and, briefly, Lord Chancellor. She is the aunt of the actor Nigel Havers. Educated at Broomfield House School and then the girls’ boarding school Wycombe Abbey, she never attended university. She spent a year in Lausanne and later took a secretarial course while helping to care for her mother, who suffered from multiple sclerosis. Inspired by watching her father in court, she read for the Bar and was called by the Inner Temple in 1955 at the age of twenty-one, one of only about sixty women among two thousand barristers that year.
In 1958 she married fellow barrister Joseph William Alexander Butler-Sloss. They had three children: a daughter, Frances, and two sons, Robert and William. The following year, while pregnant, she stood as the Conservative candidate in the safe Labour seat of Vauxhall and lost. She later described politics as “ridiculous” and concentrated on the Bar and family life. She practised as a barrister until 1970. That year, at thirty-six, she was appointed a divorce registrar because the authorities wanted a married woman with children in family work. She has said her father advised her to put husband and children first and that she accepted the post thinking it would limit her career.
Promotion came faster than expected. In 1979 she became the fourth woman appointed to the High Court, assigned like her predecessors to the Family Division, and was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. In 1987 she was chosen to chair the public inquiry into the Cleveland child abuse crisis, in which 121 children had been taken into care in a few months on the basis of controversial medical diagnoses. Her report emphasised that children are people, not objects of concern, and that professionals must listen to them. Many of her recommendations were incorporated into the Children Act 1989, which made the welfare of the child the court’s paramount consideration and tightened the circumstances in which children could be removed from their parents.
The following year she became the first woman appointed a Lord Justice of Appeal. At first she was styled Lord Justice Butler-Sloss until the Master of the Rolls allowed the title Lady Justice. She sat in the Court of Appeal until 1999, when she was appointed President of the Family Division, the first woman to hold that office and, until Brenda Hale’s elevation in 2004, the highest-ranking female judge in the United Kingdom. She retired from the bench in 2005 and was advanced to the Dame Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire. In 2006 she was created a life peer as Baroness Butler-Sloss of Marsh Green in Devon and has sat as a crossbencher.
Her judicial work included several well-known and sometimes controversial decisions. She granted lifelong anonymity to the child killers of James Bulger. She authorised a fifteen-year-old already a mother to have an abortion against her parents’ wishes. She refused a mother’s application to sterilise her mentally disabled adult daughter. She ruled that gay couples could adopt. She dealt with right-to-die cases involving patients in a permanent vegetative state. Some of her family rulings provoked protests from groups such as Fathers4Justice, including demonstrations outside her Devon home.
After retirement she chaired the inquiries into the deaths of Diana, Princess of Wales, and Dodi Fayed until June 2007, when she stood down following a legal challenge. In July 2014 she was appointed to lead a wide-ranging inquiry into historical child sexual abuse but resigned within days after criticism that her brother’s role as Attorney General in the 1980s created a conflict of interest. She has remained active in public life. She chairs the National Commission on Forced Marriage, co-chairs the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Modern Slavery and Human Trafficking, and has served on commissions examining religion and belief in British public life. She has been Chancellor of the University of the West of England, chairman of the Advisory Council of St Paul’s Cathedral, and chair of the commission that advised on the appointment of an Archbishop of Canterbury. She is an Anglican and has written about her faith.
Butler-Sloss has often been described as practical, robust and decisive, with a no-nonsense manner combined with courtesy. Colleagues noted her common sense and willingness to listen. She has said she did not set out to be a pioneer and did not expect to reach the heights she did, but she enjoyed the work. She combined a demanding career with raising three children and later grandchildren. Her husband died in 2022. At ninety-three she continues to speak in the House of Lords on family law, trafficking and related subjects. Her career traces the opening of the senior English judiciary to women and the modernisation of family law around the principle that the child’s welfare comes first.