My Lord, My Lady, Your Worship: a case for a uniform address of 'Justice'
Why the High and Magistrates' courts should also adopt ‘Justice’ as honorific
There is a small piece of theatre that every South African advocate and court-appearing attorney performs. We rise; bow; we wait to be ‘seen’; ‘beg’ to hand up a draft; ‘pray’ for relief; and we address the bench as ‘My Lord’ or ‘My Lady’ in the High Court, and the magistrate as ‘Your Worship’. The words are spoken so reflexively that their strangeness has worn smooth for most. One might get used to them (after initial apprehension of the oddity), and one does not fight the convention. But the forms are worth pausing over, because they are not neutral courtesies. They are, in the semiotic sense, signs — and the order they signify is not the one our Constitution announces.
Court is a theatre of what might be called the sublime: a register, beyond ordinary reason, in which authority is staged rather than argued.1 Aoife Monks observes that the uniform dress and conduct of judicial officers efface the individual and conjure a ‘singular face of the law’ — law’s ‘sublime theatricality’.2 Forms of address belong to that apparatus. As Michał Dudek and Mateusz Stępień note, no other secular institution depends on symbol, ritual and speech to the degree courts do, and titles in particular widen the ‘power distance’ between bench and bar within Foucault’s ‘microphysics of power’.3 The honorific is laden.
The genealogy is telling. ‘Lord’ and ‘Lady’ descend from the Old English hlāford (‘loaf-ward’, guardian of bread) and hlǣfdige (‘loaf-kneader’) respectively. Lord later became understood as ‘master of a household, ruler, feudal lord, superior, husband, God’.4 Lady as ‘mistress of a household, wife of a lord’.5 Oxford English Dictionary puts it more bluntly: ‘The male (‘or female’) head of a household; a man/woman who has authority over servants, attendants, or slaves.’6
After the Norman Conquest, ‘lord of the manor’ named a feudal authority figure whose force derived from the existence and operation of a manorial court.7 The address we still use is thus a survival of a hierarchy rooted in landholding: it hails the judge as a feudal proprietor of order. In a country whose Constitution is animated by the undoing of authoritarian land control and by transformative constitutionalism,8 that is a peculiar thing to keep saying aloud.
‘Your Worship’ carries a different but related charge. The word is ‘worth-ship’: the ascription of worth to an office-holder. But the same root yields the worship owed to God. In the legal order from which South Africa inherited its court culture, that connection was not merely linguistic — the Crown derived its authority from God, and the magistrate derived his from the Crown. The Constitution has since displaced that chain, locating supreme authority not in the divine but in the Constitution itself and the people it serves. Yet something of that charge persists in the form itself — the ecclesiastical, sublime quality at the heart of courtroom performance: law borrowing the affect of the sacred to naturalise its authority. The written law, as Peter Goodrich puts it, ‘is nothing without its liturgical setting … its animation in the hands and rites of lawyers’.9 The titles are part of that liturgy.
‘My Lord’ and ‘My Lady’ entered the South African courts with the English reception that accompanied the Union of South Africa in 1910, and were carried into the democratic constitutional order. The Constitutional Court broke with the script. Just as Justices Yvonne Mokgoro and Albie Sachs and their brothers and sisters oversaw the design of that court that signalled a deliberate reorientation away from a Eurocentric, hierarchical model of justice, the Court replaced ‘My Lord/Ladyship’ with the gender-neutral ‘Justice’ — a small but hardly inconsequential rewriting of the colonial–apartheid script of address. The Supreme Court of Appeal followed: by practice directive (first 2007, restated 15 November 2014) it abolished ‘My Lord’, ‘My Lady’, ‘Your Lordship(s)’ and ‘Your Ladyship(s)’ in English, directing instead that the bench be addressed as ‘the Court’ and individual members as ‘Justice’ followed by surname.
The High Courts, and the Magistrates’ Courts below them, were left behind. They retain ‘My Lord/Lordship’, ‘My Lady/Ladyship’ and ‘Your Worship’. The result is the contrasting oddity that practitioners have remarked on for decades. Why must the High Court and Magistrate courts remain stuck in feudal English? ‘These contrasting approaches are as confusing as they are interesting, and result in frequently confused men and women who address commissioners in the small claims courts as “Your Majesty”’, Tasneem Antulay remarks, asking why should ‘Your Majesty’ raise a snigger while ‘Your Worship’ does not.10
Convention carries the law. The legal order sustains its legitimacy in part through continuity: it changes slowly, by design, because law’s authority rests not only on reason but on the accumulated weight of forms — on what Adam Gearey calls the ‘panoply of courtroom markers’ that impress upon the observer ‘the majesty of the law, demonstrating law’s history, autonomy and continuity’.11 Abrupt change punctures that spell; incremental change renews it. A court building as theatre, Linda Mulcahy argues, can associate law with conservative tradition or signal a commitment to change; the risk of the former is that institutions of justice become ‘frozen sites of nostalgia’.12 One can respect the value of incremental change and still insist that this particular relic of address has outlived its time.
The honour we extend is owed not to the individual on the bench but to the role he or she — or better, they — occupy, as a sign of respect for the rule of law. In America, Judge Benjamin Beaton argues against ‘Your Honor’ as ungrammatical and quasi-noble, preferring the functional ‘Judge’.13 Aaron Walayat replies to Beaton that titles are a form of what Confucius called li (ritual) and Adams the ‘language of signs’ — the legal ‘play’ is the thing, and a depersonalised honorific — something beyond the bare ‘Judge’ (making a case for ‘Your Honor’) — reminds the presiding officer that she speaks for the law, not for herself.14 This is, for us, an aside: the South African choice has apparently been made. Our apex courts did not reach for ‘Your Honour’ (in Afrikaans, ‘U Edele’). They adopted ‘Justice’ — the apter term because it names what the institution is supposed to stand for.
That choice belongs to the same careful remodelling of the judicial playbook by which the Constitutional Court placed justice — figured as ‘justice under a tree’, the deliberative, communal, interconnected and rooted practice — at the symbolic centre of the constitutional order, in place of the scales, the sword, the gavel and the iconography of older societal orders, and those conveyed in popular global media.
One obstacle might arise: does extending ‘Justice’ to the High Court appropriate for its judges a higher style? The objection holds only within the hierarchical logic of the profession, but it shouldn’t be reserved for the highest. ‘Justice’ is not a rung; it is a description of office shared by everyone who exercises judicial power, and nothing in the apex courts’ usage marks it as a rank to be guarded.
There is a further, constitutionally informed reason to prefer ‘Justice’: it is gender- and sex-neutral. The High Court forms compel a gender or sex classification at every address — ‘Lord’ or ‘Lady’ — obliging counsel to assign one to the judge each time they rise.
When British Columbia’s superior courts abolished ‘My Lord’ and ‘My Lady’ in 2021, they did so on this ground: the provincial bar president called gendered address a ‘colonial-classist throwback’, and Lisa Nevens noted that a judge’s gender ‘is as irrelevant … as their race, religion, sexual orientation’, yet ‘is referenced every time a justice is addressed’.15
Our Constitution entrenches non-sexism as a founding value; furthermore, we are neither a theocratic nor a monarchical state. A form of address that demands a daily, binary sex-marking of the bench in colonial grammar— and that makes no comfortable provision for a judge who identifies as neither ‘Lord’ nor ‘Lady’ — is out of step with the order it serves. ‘Justice’ dissolves the problem without awkwardness.
Change is, in any event, already stirring from within. I have been in court with an acting judge who indicated that he would prefer to be addressed as ‘Judge’, though without forcing the point. I know of senior–junior counsel who have quietly taken to addressing High Court judges as ‘Justice’ — a subtle but notable signalling of the need for reform, which works only once one is senior enough that the bench will not intervene. (It is worth mentioning that the accepted address out of court, in chambers or in any forum off the record, is already simply ‘Judge’; and that ‘Counsel’ — a comfortable, all-encompassing term for an increasingly diverse Bar — has long done its work without distinction of rank or sex.)
The remedy is administratively trivial. It requires only a practice directive — for a Division as a whole, or, failing that, a provision in individual judges’ roll directives permitting a prescribed alternative form of address. The one thing that is needed is authority from above: a sanction that allows ‘Justice’ to be used, so that it is not mistaken for a High Court judge arrogating to themself a more exalted style. The law, being all about hierarchy, requires the permission to come from the top. Once it does, the change costs nothing and settles within a term.
The case is clear and the remedy uncontroversial. The honorifics of the High Court and the Magistrates’ Courts are the last prominent unrevised lines of a colonial script — a feudal lordship and an ecclesiastical worship retained, by inertia, inside a transformative constitutional order. The apex courts have shown that decorum and gravitas survive the substitution; that the law retains its ‘auratic shimmer’16 when ‘Justice’ takes the place of ‘My Lord’. A uniform ‘Justice’ across all courts would not diminish the bench. It would, more honestly than the inherited forms, name what we ask the bench to stand for.
Shaw The Sublime (2006)
Monks ‘Dressing the law’ (2018) 14 International Journal of Law in Context
Dudek & Stępień Courtroom Power Distance Dynamics (2021)
Harper ‘Etymology of lord’ Online Etymology Dictionary https://www.etymonline.com/word/lord
Harper ‘Etymology of lady’ Online Etymology Dictionary https://www.etymonline.com/word/lady
Oxford English Dictionary, ‘lord’ ‘lady’ (n.), senses I.1
Britannica “court baron” Encyclopedia Britannica https://www.britannica.com/topic/court-baron
Klare ‘Legal Culture and Transformative Constitutionalism’ (1998) 14 SAJHR
Goodrich ‘Casting spectres’ (2022) 16 Law and Humanities
Antulay ‘What’s in a name?’ (2015) Without Prejudice https://maponya.co.za/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Whats-in-a-name_-Without-Prejudice.pdf; also see Rose Attorneys ‘21st Century South Africa’s Lords and Ladies of the courtroom’ (2013) https://roseattorneys.co.za/21st-century-south-africas-lords-and-ladies-of-the-courtroom/
Gearey Law and Aesthetics (2001)
Mulcahy Legal Architecture (2011)
Beaton ‘Judging Titles’ (2022) 29 Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy — Per Curiam 1 https://journals.law.harvard.edu/jlpp/judging-titles-judge-benjamin-beaton/
Walayat ‘The Play’s the Thing’ (2023) 2023 Pepperdine Law Review 101 https://digitalcommons.pepperdine.edu/plr/vol2023/iss1/6/
Hainsworth ‘B.C. high courts do away with my lord, my lady’ (2021) Victoria Times Colonist https://www.timescolonist.com/bc-news/bc-high-courts-do-away-with-my-lord-my-lady-4786351
Sherwin Visualizing Law in the Age of the Digital Baroque (2011)
Beautiful read that thoughtfully analyses and challenges the status quo. 👌🏽
Too often, we continue doing things simply because we found them that way, without ever questioning where they come from or whether they still make sense.
I enjoyed seeing that being explored from a legal perspective. Law is often perceived as a rigid and unquestionable system, so it was refreshing to see such critical engagement with it.
An insightful and thought-provoking read Francois! Brilliant!