Counsel Magazine

The Supreme Court was officially opened on 16 October 2009. Speaking at the ceremony, the Secretary of State for Justice Jack Straw said that the new Supreme Court “mixes the old and the new, and keeps the historic balance between Parliament, government and the judiciary, the bedrock of the British constitutional settlement. But the judges will be in a new environment with all the benefits this brings – as Andrew Motion’s fine poem puts it: ‘new structures but an old foundation stone’.” (See also pp 10-12 and 14-16.)