LewisGraham, Judicial Individuality on the UK Supreme Court, Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2025, 304 pp, hb, £85.00.

Judicial Individuality on the UK Supreme Court is a deeply unfashionable book.Legal academics in the UK rarely address the issue of judges having individual personalities which impinge upon their decisions.More than half a century on from Lord Reid counselling us to stop believing in fairytales, and that judges do indeed create law rather than simply declare it (Lord Reid 'The judge as law maker ' (1972) 12 Journal of the Society of Public Teachers of Law 22, 29), we continue to shy away from addressing the implications of judicial personality within the UK's governance order.For some, these are likely questions 'better not asked', and indeed worth actively avoiding, out of a fear of becoming mired in so much of US constitutional scholarship's crude reduction of judicial studies to debates over the spectrum of liberal and conservative judges (for critique of this tendency, see Lee Epstein, William M. Landes and Richard A. Posner, The Behavior of Federal Judges: A Theoretical and Empirical Study of Rational Choice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013)).For others, these questions have already been answered and, following John Griffith, nothing radical or emancipatory should be expected from judges who are generally products of a self-perpetuating conveyor belt through public schools, Oxford colleges and into the legal establishment (The Politics of the Judiciary (London: Fontana Press, 1997)).Judges themselves have long sought to dead bat these questions, perpetuating a conception of being painfully conscious that it is not the role of courts within the UK's jurisdictions to rock the boat, and that even if they sometimes do, this 'power is, of course, always subject to Parliament' (Lord Dyson, 'Are the judges too powerful?'Bentham Association, Presidential Address, UCL, London, 12 March 2014, 8).Even as legislation like the Human Rights Act 1998 has propelled the judiciary into areas of policy making in which they once had a smaller role, judges often remain careful to couch their decisions in assertions that parliament has imposed an 'interpretive obligation' upon them (Sheldrake v Director of Public Prosecutions [2004] UKHL 43 at [28] per Lord Bingham).The UK Supreme Court would often like to convey the impression that if sway exists, it rests with the judge who is perceived to be the expert on a particular topic (see Chris Hanretty, A Court of Specialists: Judicial Behaviour on the UK Supreme Court (Oxford: OUP, 2020)).And so, when UK Supreme Court vacancies arise, discussions often turn on perceived gaps in the Court's expertise, as if the judges could not develop their respective expertise or lacked the support of reasoned argument, in addition to the