Arrangements to fill the 12th seat on the Supreme Court bench should be well under way by now, with no more applications being accepted for the vacancy.

If Jonathan Sumption QC is recommended for appointment we can expect to hear rumblings from the Court of Appeal that this is not a job for a barrister, however distinguished, who has no appellate experience in the UK and who has never served as a full-time judge. On the other hand, if the selection commission plays safe and chooses a Lord Justice of Appeal, there is likely to be as little media coverage as there used to be when new law lords were named. Not even the announcement this year that the first solicitor would be joining Britain’s highest court merited a news story in the national press.

Visiting lawyers are bemused by the public’s indifference to our highest courts and those who serve on them. Michael Kirby recently retired after 13 years as a Justice of the High Court of Australia, his country’s final court. In London last week to address a seminar held by the Society of Legal Scholars in the Law Society’s Hall, he was scathing about initial press coverage of the UK Supreme Court. ‘Much of it was of the superficial infotainment variety,’ he said dismissively.

The court that took over from the law lords last month has an unsophisticated approach to public relations and it must share some of the blame for the critical media coverage it received. I am not sure whether its justices would include in that category my own modest analysis of the Supreme Court in the Gazette and other journals — or the BBC radio documentary on which it was based.

But Kirby was right to say that in Britain we pay very little attention to judicial appointments. No doubt this is because we assume that the law will be upheld in pretty much the same way regardless of who gets the job.

That’s not how he sees it. Having done the job himself, Kirby believes that judges who are appointed to a final national court inevitably bring with them values that influence their judicial decisions. In his view, ‘the fiction that such judging is value-free or value-neutral is wearing thin and unlikely to last for much longer.’

Quite right. We don’t believe in fairy tales any more, as Lord Reid said as long ago as 1972 in a lecture to the same learned body. But if we accept that policy-based questions cannot always be resolved by reference to past authority, we need to pay more attention to the backgrounds of those who have to take such decisions.

At the very least, we should encourage Justices of the Supreme Court to sit in panels of nine, as they are doing in two cases this term. The larger the court, the more representative it will be. And nine is effectively a full house at the moment, given that Lord Saville will apparently be devoting much of the next four months to numbering the pages of his report on Bloody Sunday.

Meanwhile, the 12th member of the court has to be selected by a five-person commission consisting of the court’s president, the deputy president and members of the judicial appointments bodies for England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. They, in turn, must consult the other members of the Supreme Court and the most senior judges in the appeal courts of the UK. Then the Lord Chancellor must go through most of the consultation again. But at the end of this convoluted and bureaucratic process, I strongly suspect that the prime minister will find himself recommending to the Queen whoever has found favour with the court’s most senior judges, Lord Phillips and Lord Hope.

Contrast this with what happened before the Constitutional Reform Act 2005 came into force. The appointment was in the hands of a Lord Chancellor who acted in a non-partisan way. By convention, he would consult the judges.

Ultimately, it was one man’s decision. But at least one could see who was responsible and blame him if he got it wrong. The old system had what Kirby describes as a ‘muted political legitimacy’.

Nobody would want to go as far as the US, where nominees to the Supreme Court must submit themselves to confirmation hearings. To win Senate approval, Justice Sonia Sotomayor felt obliged to retreat from some entirely uncontroversial views she had espoused before her nomination.

But it would still be possible to devise a British judicial appointments system that had some political legitimacy. A shortlist of candidates could be provided on whom the public could express their views. Failing that, at least we could be given the name of the preferred candidate ahead of a formal decision. Then, for example, we could all debate whether a lack of full-time judicial experience is more than compensated for by an intimate knowledge of the Hundred Years’ War and a brain the size of a planet.

In Australia, the attorney general of each state is consulted before an appointment is made to the High Court — although the decision is ultimately one for the federal cabinet.

In recommending a similar role for successive British governments, Kirby insists he is not seeking to politicise the courts. But he believes that a much broader perspective is needed if we are to achieve the diversity on which our society depends.

In his view, judicial dominance of the appointments procedures is even more of a threat than dominance by politicians.