In conversation with Lady Arden of Heswall, DBE

About the Event

The UCL Centre for Ethics & Law is delighted to invite you to join this distinguished conversation between Professor John Lowry and Lady Arden of Heswall, as they explore Lady Arden's transformative influence on modern company law.

Lady Arden's remarkable career spans her pioneering role as the first female Chair of the Law Commission of England and Wales, her instrumental participation in the Company Law Review Steering Group that produced the Companies Act 2006, and her distinguished judicial service culminating in the UK Supreme Court. An early advocate of law and economics, Lady Arden championed economic efficiency as the cornerstone of effective corporate regulation, whilst maintaining an unwavering commitment to principled yet pragmatic legal development.

This engaging discussion will examine Lady Arden's dual legacy as both reformer and judge, exploring landmark cases such as Murad v A-Saraj, Item Software v Fassihi, and BTI v Sequana, where her reasoning demonstrates the careful balance between legal certainty and commercial practicality. The conversation will explore how Lady Arden's approach to directors' duties, fiduciary obligations, and corporate governance reflects her core belief that company law must serve both economic efficiency and societal needs. The conversation will illuminate Lady Arden’s approach of harnessing rigorous legal principle while remaining responsive to modern commercial realities, offering valuable insights for practitioners, academics, and students interested in the evolution of corporate law and judicial reasoning.

Please submit questions in advance to laws-events@ucl.ac.uk

Speakers

About Lady Arden:

Lady Arden of Heswall became a Justice of the Supreme Court in October 2018, retiring in 2022. Lady Arden grew up in Liverpool. She read law at Girton College Cambridge and Harvard Law School. Called to the Bar in 1971, she became a Queen's Counsel in 1986 and served as Attorney General of the Duchy of Lancaster between 1991 and 1993. She served on the Court of Appeal of England and Wales from 2000 to 2018.

Lady Arden’s judicial career began in 1993 when she was appointed to the High Court of Justice of England and Wales as the first woman judge assigned to the Chancery Division. Alongside her judicial experience, she has written extensively on how the law keeps pace with social change. Her two-volume book Shaping Tomorrow's Law was published in 2015. It drew strongly on her knowledge of law reform, which she began to develop while serving as Chairman of the Law Commission of England and Wales from 1996 to1999.

Between 2005 and September 2018, Lady Arden was Judge in Charge, Head of International Judicial Relations for England and Wales. She organised bilateral exchanges between the senior Judiciary of the UK and the judiciaries of leading national and supranational courts overseas. She became a Member of the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague in 2011, and is an ad hoc UK judge of the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.

About Professor John Lowry

John is an Emeritus Professor of Law at UCL, Faculty of Laws. He was Vice Dean of the Faculty and Head of the Department of Law between 2007-11. He has taught law in the USA and practised in Canada specialising in corporate litigation.

John has published widely in domestic and international law journals on directors’ duties, shareholder remedies and insurance contract law and he has co-authored books on company law, insurance law, and limitation of actions. He is Company Law section editor for the Journal of Business Law and Case Review editor for International Corporate Rescue. He also serves on the editorial boards of The Company Lawyer; Current Legal Problems; European Business Law Review; and Laws. He has been a contributing editor to Gore-Browne on Companies and OUP's Annotated Companies Legislation.

Between 2000-2002 John was a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies. In 2001 he was a Visiting Fellow at the University of Connecticut, Centre for Insurance Law Research and in 2010 he was Distinguished Global Jurist Visiting Professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. In 2008 he was elected an Honorary Fellow of Monash University. He is currently Visiting Professor of Commercial Law at the University of Hong Kong and an Honorary Fellow of the Asian Institute of International Financial Law.

John has acted as consultant to the Law Commission (shareholder remedies; directors’ duties; and insurance contract law) and his work (including joint authorship) has been cited by the Law Commission and Scottish Law Commission and the Law Reform Commission (Ireland); by appellate courts in England and Wales, Australia (NSWCA), Canada (SC), New Zealand and Singapore (and his work on insurance fraud was argued before the UKSC in Versloot Dredging BV v HDI-Gerling Industrie Versicherung (The DC Merwestone)). In 2015 he was appointed a member of the Hong Kong Standing Committee on Company Law Reform.

Chair:

Dr Anna Donovan is an Associate Professor in Corporate Law and Director of the UCL Centre for Ethics & Law. She was previously Vice Dean (Innovation) at the Faculty of Laws. Anna is an advisory board member at the BASIL research initiative and a member of the International Scientific Committee of the journal ‘Ethics and Justice: Journal of Legal Culture.’ A former member of LawtechUK where she was Chair of its Education Taskforce, Anna is a member of the UCL Centre for Blockchain Technologies and a winner of TechWomen100.

Annas’s research sits at the intersection of corporate law and behaviour, exploring how institutional rules shape human decision making – often in unintended ways. Anna's work has been applied across legal fields including business ethics, compliance, corruption and technology. Her monograph, Reconceptualising Corporate Compliance, Responsibility, Freedom and the Law, was joint runner up for the Peter Birks prize for outstanding legal scholarship. Anna is co-editor of ‘Pettet, Lowry and Reisberg’s Company Law.’ Prior to academia, Anna was a corporate lawyer in the City. She is also admitted as an attorney in New York.

About the Centre

UCL's Centre for Ethics & Law promotes and enhances collaboration between corporates, practitioners, civil servants, academics and others around the broad themes of professional ethics and the ethics of risk. Subscribe to receive updates on the centre and similar events.