Tweets for Lord Reed
Lord Reed has been sworn in as the twelth Justice of the Supreme Court – accompanied by a flurry of tweets.
The arrival of the former Court of Session judge continues the tradition that two of the Court’s Justices have experience of the Scottish legal system.
The Court marked the occasion by launching a twitter account (@UKSupremeCourt) enabling it to tweet, “Lord Reed bows to his new judicial colleagues; they bow back. Now officially a Supreme Court Justice, he begins sitting tomorrow.”
It has become tradition for a new Justice to shake hands with each of their fellow Justices in turn, before bowing to them. The bench of Justices then bow to the new Justice in return.
In future, the Court will tweet judgments and other news two or three times a week. It has agreed to deal with any Freedom of Information requests it receives via Twitter.
Lord Reed started work the following day. He joined a panel of five Justices sitting as the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council hearing a planning dispute case over the commercial development of ‘New Kingston’ in Jamaica.
He was admitted to the Faculty of Advocates in 1983 and appointed to the Bench in 1998. In 1999 he sat as an ad hoc judge of the European Court of Human Rights, and has sat in both the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council and as an Acting Judge of the Supreme Court.
