Harry Woolf

Harry Kenneth Woolf, Baron Woolf, (born 2 May 1933) is a British life peer and retired barrister and judge.

Woolf was born in Newcastle upon Tyne, on 2 May 1933, to Alexander Susman Woolf and his wife Leah.

His grandfather Harry was a naturalised Briton of Polish and Russian Jewish origins.

His father had been a fine art dealer, but was persuaded to run his own building business instead by his wife.

They had four children, but their first child died, and his mother was protective of the three surviving children.

Woolf lived in Newcastle-upon-Tyne until he was about five years old, when his family moved to Glasgow, Scotland, where he attended Glasgow Academy going on to Fettes College, an Edinburgh public school, where he mostly enjoyed his time and had supportive friends.

Woolf formed much of his sense of justice and fairness from his experiences at Fettes College.

On one occasion while combing his hair, Woolf leaned into a neighbouring dormitory cubicle to use the mirror.

A prefect reported this as the school had strict rules about being in other pupils' cubicles, but Woolf felt that he had not broken the rules because he did not have his feet inside the cubicle at the time.

He appealed for fairness, but his housemaster, who had been in the army, increased Woolf's punishment from six strokes of the cane to eight.

Woolf had read books about lawyers and wanted to be a barrister.

His housemaster told him that this was not a suitable career-choice for him because he had a stutter, but this only made Woolf more determined in his vocation.

His A level results gained him a place at the University of Cambridge; however, he studied law at University College London (UCL) instead, as a consequence of his parents' move to London at about that time.

Woolf chose to be a barrister in 1955 and began practising on the Oxford circuit.

He became Junior Counsel to the Inland Revenue (Common Law) from 1973 to 1974, and was promoted to First Junior Treasury Counsel (Common Law) from 1974 to 1979.

A significant part of his practice as the "Treasury Devil" was in the development of the nascent Administrative Law from four ancient Prerogative Writs.

Before the Administrative Court was established, almost all judicial reviews were heard before the Lord Chief Justice sitting in a Divisional Court of the Queen's Bench Division, with Woolf commonly appearing for the Crown.

When he took silk he was almost immediately appointed as a High Court judge in that Division in 1979, aged 45, and received the customary accolade of knighthood.

He was promoted to Lord Justice of Appeal and automatically made a member of Her Majesty's Most Honourable Privy Council (PC) in 1986.

Lord Justice Woolf was appointed to hold a five-month public inquiry with Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Prisons, Judge Stephen Tumim, into the disturbances at Strangeways prison, Manchester and other prisons between 11 June on 31 October 1990.

His inquiry sent letters to every prisoner and prison officer in the country.

The Woolf Report, quoting many of the 1700 replies, was published on 25 February 1991, and blamed the loss of control of the Strangeways prison on the prison officers abandoning the gates outside the chapel, which "effectively handed the prison to the prisoners".

More fundamentally, however, Woolf blamed the "intolerable" conditions inside Strangeways in the months leading up to the riots and a "combination of errors" by the prison staff and Prison Service management as a central contributing factor.

Finally, he blamed the failure of successive governments to "provide the resources to the Prison Service which were needed to enable the Service to provide for an increased prison population in a humane manner".

Woolf recommended major reform of the Prison Service, and made 12 key recommendations with 204 accompanying proposals.

He subsequently became patron of the Rehabilitation for Addicted Prisoners Trust and an Ambassador for the Prison Advice and Care Trust.

Woolf LJ was appointed a Law Lord on 1 October 1992, being created a life peer as Baron Woolf, of Barnes in the London Borough of Richmond.

He was Master of the Rolls from 1996 until 2000 and Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales from 2000 until 2005.

Woolf gave few judgments on the Appellate Committee, being promoted Master of the Rolls on 4 June 1996.

, a role in which he presided over the Chancery law in the Court of Appeal.

In 1998 Woolf was also the head of the committee that modernised civil procedure, and incidentally excised most Latin terms from English law in an effort to make it more accessible (such as changing the word "plaintiff" to "claimant").

The Civil Procedure Rules 1998 are a direct result of this work.

On 6 June 2000 he finally succeeded Lord Bingham of Cornhill as Lord Chief Justice.

He was a Non-Permanent Judge of the Court of Final Appeal of Hong Kong from 2003 to 2012.

He sits in the House of Lords as a crossbencher.

In 2003, he was appointed a Non-Permanent Judge of the Court of Final Appeal of Hong Kong, which position he held until 2012.

In this most senior judicial post, Woolf spoke out at the University of Cambridge in 2004 against the Constitutional Reform Bill that would create a Supreme Court of the United Kingdom to replace the House of Lords as the final court of appeal in the United Kingdom; and he severely questioned the Lord Chancellor's and the Government's handling of recent constitutional reforms.

He delayed his retirement as Lord Chief Justice until these issues had been resolved.

The Constitutional Reform Act 2005 made him the first Lord Chief Justice to be President of the Courts of England and Wales.

On his retirement as Lord Chief Justice on 1 October 2005, Woolf joined Blackstone Chambers as a mediator and arbitrator.