Detailed statistical data is provided of how each of the justices voted in a range of different contexts, including cases involving the state, socio-economic underdogs, female parties, human rights and immigration.

Asked by Joshua Rozenberg about his reasons for writing the book, Lewis Graham replied disarmingly: “I’m a nerd and I find this stuff absolutely fascinating.” There is a feel of Wisden Cricketers’ Almanac about aspects of the book, but many lawyers will share the author’s fascination. There is plenty of material here for the office pub quiz. Do more appeals to the Supreme Court succeed or fail? (More fail, but not by much. The success rate during the period under review was around 48 per cent, although the figure for Scottish appeals was slightly lower at 44 per cent.) Which justice sat in most cases during the Supreme Court’s first decade? (Lady Hale by miles, although the “workaholic” Lord Neuberger, who was on the court for only part of that time, averaged a higher number of cases per annum.)

Nerdiness aside, there is a serious purpose in the book. In contrast to the position in the United States, Supreme Court justices in the UK are not appointed on political grounds but they are individuals who, inevitably, have different views on political, socio-economic and other issues. Do these differences affect the way they decide cases? To put it another way, does it matter which judges sit on which cases? Can the outcome of appeals be affected by the composition of the court?

I suspect that most litigators, based on experience in courts at a less exalted level, would instinctively answer these questions in the affirmative. Dr Graham’s research confirms that they would be correct to do so. The data he presents demonstrates that some justices are a good deal more inclined than others, for example, to rule against the state, to uphold human rights claims or to depart from precedent. 

Is this a cause for concern? Probably not. It would be surprising if the analysis did not show such differences. As the author acknowledges, the fact that the justices are not uniform in their actions and often disagree with one another may be seen as evidence that judicial independence is working well. In most areas, most of the justices’ “batting averages” are relatively close to most of their colleagues. If there is an outlier, it is undoubtedly the late Lord Kerr who emerges, by a distance, as the most liberal and independent-minded of the members of the court in its first decade. He was the most likely to side with socio-economic underdogs and stands out as the most ECHR-friendly justice by a significant margin. Lord Kerr was also the member most likely to vote against the state in cases on which the court split, his record prompting Lord Reed to observe extrajudicially (with tongue in cheek, one assumes) that “he sometimes appeared to apply a presumption that the government was in the wrong”.

Litigation nerds will be interested to see how the individual justices emerge from the analysis. Much of Graham’s research may confirm what they already assumed, at least in relation to the highest profile justices. Lady Hale was a good deal more likely than most of her colleagues to side with socio-economic underdogs and female parties. Lord Sumption was the justice least likely to find a breach of Convention rights

Readers of Scottish Legal News will be interested in the profiles of the four Scottish justices who sat on the court during the period under review. On most issues, their voting records are relatively close to the median. Lord Hope delivered the lead judgment in 40 per cent of the cases in which he sat – the highest of any of the justices who sat in 10 or more cases – and in almost 70 per cent of the Scottish appeals. Lord Rodger – who sat on every Scottish appeal during his tenure – was one of only three justices with a dissent rate of over 10 per cent. Lord Hodge is assessed as being one of the court’s more conservative figures, adopting a restrained and institutional approach.

Graham finds Lord Reed difficult to pin down, his voting record during the period under review not exhibiting obvious preferences. Some commentators have argued that, since Lord Reed’s appointment as president, the court has adopted a more conservative – or, for admirers, restrained and disciplined – approach. The jurisprudence of the Reed Court falls outside the parameters of the data set, but in a brief overview Graham does find evidence of a more conservative approach, notably in cases involving the executive and claims of breach of human rights.

Dr Graham’s purpose is to describe the findings of his research rather than to criticise. He casts no aspersions on the conduct of any of the justices. On the contrary, he is at pains to emphasize that nothing in the book should be taken to suggest that Supreme Court justices have ever acted other than in good faith. However, in the closing chapter he does offer two suggestions for change in relation to panel selection. The first and less radical is to introduce a system of random allocation of justices similar to that applied to panel selection in Grand Chamber cases before the European Court of Human Rights. While at first blush this seems sensible, allocation would have to be controlled to a considerable degree in order to ensure even workloads, presence of Scottish judges on Scottish appeals and, one might think, that justices with particular expertise in complex areas of law sat in appeals about these areas. These matters aside, an objection to random selection is that it could produce perverse results in the shape of “unbalanced” panels which the current system generally seems to avoid.

A more radical proposal is that the court should sit en banc – with all justices present. That would avoid any suggestion that the outcome of an appeal would have been different if a different panel had determined it. The court has, of course, sat en banc before in the two Miller cases but doing so on a regular basis would come at considerable cost in the shape of a reduced caseload and/or delays in the production of judgments. It therefore seems likely that sitting en banc will remain confined to a small number of exceptional cases.

Judicial Individuality on the UK Supreme Court by Lewis Graham. Published by Bloomsbury Publishing, 279pp, £76.50