Supreme Court justice-elect Jonathan Sumption QC may be of a dazzlingly high intellectual calibre with a heady penchant for the Hundred Years War but, as Roger Smith intimates, is he so subjective in his view of the role of the state in modern Britain that he is willing to regularly lean towards its submissions from his lofty perch in Parliament Square?

The legal profession has long welcomed the requirement of national and local government, as well as their numerous agency offshoots, to act reasonably when applying any of the myriad laws, statutory instruments, regulations and so on to particular cases. For too many years the judiciary had not been keen to encourage challenges to the executive, however irrational the decisions made by what were in effect public servants.

In his new role, Sumption may prefer a literal interpretation without any concern for outcome, but hopefully his less learned colleagues who have been well schooled in Wednesbury principles during their time at the bar and elsewhere will outvote him in order to preserve the high regard in which our legal system is still held throughout large parts of the world.

If he remains unconvinced, then he should read Lord Diplock’s comments in the 1985 House of Lords case of Council of Civil Service Unions v Minister for the Civil Service; when he reminded us that a bad administrative decision should be declared to be unreasonable where it is ‘so outrageous in its defiance of logic or accepted moral standards that no sensible person who had applied his mind to the question to be decided could have arrived at it’.

Bill Jackson, Nottingham